Taking Stock

One step forward, two steps back. That seems to be the depressing pattern of Arab media these days. If my kids brought home a report card with such mixed grades, they would be grounded for a month. Unfortunately for Arab journalists, the stakes are even higher. We begin the new year with scores of Arab reporters, editors and bloggers languishing in prison cells across the region. Even more depressingly, in 2007 48 journalists gave their lives practicing their craft in the Middle East, the vast majority of them in Iraq, where, as of this writing, 207 journalists have died since 2003, the greatest toll of reporters since World War II

Amman net founder Daoud Kuttab:“huge need for independent media in Middle East.”

There are few media professionals in the Middle East who juggle as many commitments as Daoud Kuttab. Director of the Institute of Modern Media at Al Quds University, and founder and chief of the Arab World’s first online community radio station AmmanNet, he is also a regular columnist for the Jordan Times and Jerusalem Post. So what has online radio achieved in Jordan? And where can it go from here? Co-Editor and Publisher of Arab Media & Society finds out

Beirut Outtakes: A TV Correspondent\u27s Portrait of America\u27s Encounter with Terror

Examines US policies in the troubled mideast region and offers close-up portraits of the young Marines and their Islamic opponent

Shadow plays: a dark time in Indonesia, seen through two complementary prisms

In 1997, as Indonesia\u27s economy was crumbling, I moved my family from Jakarta to Bali, putting some distance between nay children and the gathering stoma clouds in the capital. We settled on a house in a village near the island\u27s spiritual heart, Ubud, built by a well-known documentary-maker who had been killed in a freak accident. Just before we moved in, my wife visited a dukun, or traditional seer. The spirit of the land on which the house was built, the dukun warned, took a human life every few years. It intended to take a female life next. For my wife, whose own bloodline extends back to Indonesia\u27s other mystical power center, the royal kraton (palace) of Solo on the island of Java, there was no question. We had two daughters; we would find another house. I did not object. I had been in Indonesia long enough to know one did not challenge the unseen forces. There is light and there is darkness the village headman had told me a few days before the warning. They must always be kept in balance

Review: Robert J. Art and Louise Richardson (eds), Democracy and Counterterrorism: Lessons from the Past. Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, 2007. US65.00(hbk),US65.00 (hbk), US28.00 (pbk). 638 pp

In this age of 24/7 saturation coverage of all things terror-related, it is hard to conceive of a book about terrorism that does not touch on the synergistic relationship between terrorists and the media. That is doubly true of a collection marketed as ‘a comprehensive study’of the lessons drawn from recent history. Yet Democracy and Counterterrorism manages to avoid the issue almost entirely. Absent from the index to this 640-page tome are the words ‘media’,‘television’,‘newspaper’and ‘Internet’. Nowhere in the 14 case studies from Europe, South America, the Middle East and South Asia is there a substantive discussion of media as a tool of terror or a weapon of counterterrorism.‘Terrorism, let’s recall, is the deliberate use of violence, more often than not against non-combatants, to induce political change through fear’, the editors write in their introduction, paraphrasing Rand expert Bruce Hoffman (p. 8)

The new Arab journalist: Mission and identity in a time of turmoil

The Arab media is in the midst of a revolution that will inform questions of war and peace in the Middle East, political and societal reform, and relations between the West and the Arab World. Drawing on the first broad cross-border survey of Arab journalists, first-person interviews with scores of reporters and editors, and his three decades\u27 experience reporting from the Middle East, Lawrence Pintak examines how Arab journalists see themselves and their mission at this critical time in the evolution of the Arab media. He explores how, in a diverse Arab media landscape expressing myriad opinions, journalists are still under siege as governments fight a rear-guard action to manage the message. This innovative book breaks through the stereotypes about Arab journalists to reveal the fascinating and complex reality-and what it means for the rest of us

The role of the media as watch-dogs, agenda-setters and gate-keepers in Arab states

Egypt is a place where torture is institutionalized. Human Rights Watch calls the abuse of prisoners in Egypt “epidemic,” 1 Amnesty International says it is “common and systematic,” 2 and the US State Department’s 2007 Country Report on Egypt concluded that “police, security personnel, and prison guards routinely tortured and abused prisoners and detainees.” 3 The country is one of several to which the CIA, under the now-infamous rendition program, sent prisoners to be interrogated using techniques too harsh for the agency’s own operatives to administer. 4 So when two Egyptian policemen were convicted of torture in late 2007 and sent to prison, it was a landmark victory for human rights activists. It was also a seminal moment for the media. 5 The case, in which Cairo police used a nightstick to sodomize a cab driver in their custody, came to light only when Egyptian blogger Wael Abbas posted cell phone video of the assault on YouTube, sparking a media feeding-frenzy that ultimately forced the government to prosecute the kind of conduct that has long been condoned

Islam, nationalism and the mission of Arab journalism: a survey of attitudes toward religion, politics and the role of Arab media in the twenty-first century

ABSTRACT: The Bush administration has charged that reporters at Al Jazeera and other Arab media outlets are biased against the US. Whether or not such an allegation is true, it raises the central question of what influences are at work on Arab journalists at this crucial time of turmoil in the region and change in Arab media. What are their core values? To what degree do religious beliefs and ethno-nationalist attitudes shape their coverage? How do they view US policy and other regional and international issues? What do they define as the role of a journalist in the modem Arab and/or Islamic worlds? This study analyzes the responses of 517 Arab journalists who participated in the first broad, regional survey examining attitudes and values. It found that Arab journalists see the achievement of political and social change as the prime mission of Arab journalism and cited democrat as their primary political identity. When the views of self-declared secular and religious Muslim journalists were compared, there was little statistical difference in their attitudes on all but issues related to the role of clerics in Arab society

Darfur: Covering the “forgotten” story

There is no issue in Arab journalism today that is more controversial than how the region’s media cover Darfur. Not Iraq, where, according to a new report from the Arab Archives Institute, 52 Arab journalists have lost their lives since 2001; not Palestine, where journalists are caught between Israel and the Palestinians and between Fatah and Hamas; nor Lebanon, where reporters have been in the cross-hairs of rival factions and governments

Look who’s fair and balanced

The summer of 2006 marked an important milestone for Arab media. Israel and Hizbollah were locked in a bitter conflict that would claim the lives of more than 150 Israelis and an estimated 1,000 Lebanese--a third of them children. Each day brought brutal new images of civilian casualties. On American television, leading journalists, such as CNN\u27s star presenters Anderson Cooper and John Roberts, regularly referred to Hizbollah as terrorists or a terrorist militia, without bothering to attribute the label to Israeli or US sources. But on the news broadcasts of the Arab world\u27s dominant all-news channels, Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya, such polarizing language was rarely heard