The Babylon Tower situation

April 2005

Ever since the Babylon Tower incident, when God according to the Old Testament changed the tongues of humans so that they won’t understand each other, and the different peoples have been displaying an enormous inability to understand each other.

The mushrooming media outlets on the internet, radio and satellite TV makes it hard for an average person to digest the amount of news on one given day.

Even worse, there are no reliable cross national media outlets that are able to understand the true nature of the events and yet broadcast it in the language of their audience.

This discrepancy between the nature of the event and the report have created the same old-new situation: the Babylon Tower.

Read or watch the American media on the Arab world and you will find that material here is scarce, rarely comprehensive and always shallow when it comes to covering non-American news.

The end result is an American audience getting a mostly distorted picture about the Arabs, their thought and their culture. This also makes it easy for the contending Middle Eastern parties to propagate their own version of what is actually happening in that part of the world, of course each according to their own agenda.

The problem can be also seen in a reversed manner. Arab media channels and newspapers are as ignorant about the dynamics of the American society and its political institutions in as much as the American media is ignorant about the Arab world.

The Babylon Tower situation creates four possible combinations:

- Americans getting incomplete reports from the American media

- Americans checking out the Arab media but always failing to comprehend the Arab way of telling a story

- Arabs getting incomplete reports from the Arab media

- Arabs checking out the American media but like the Americans failing to comprehend the American way of telling a story, of course due to cultural differences

There is no ready-made solution for this unwanted means of communication, but for a starter, perhaps those communities who have lived on both sides can step in to make American jargon understandable to the Arabs and Arab stuff understandable to the Americans.