Media have been creating new realities, far from reporting the news

What looked like a secular uprising in the south of Iraq only merited a couple of lines in the bottom of a regular Iraq news coverage story in the New York Times

WASHINGTON DC -- Tarek Hashem

April 2005

Since the Gulf War in 1991, news stations of the likes of CNN have flourished all over the world. Besides the economical and business reasons of such a flourishing, lies a political reason.

As globalization progresses, the outreach of the media is bigger. CNN is watched by the world from New Zealand to Alaska; Arabs watch Al-Jazeera wherever they are; Francophones have their satellite channels and so on.

Some experts have spoken of globalization of the media. However, I would argue that for media to become truly global, the media have to drop their national agendas and perspectives and adopt a global view of the world as well as understand it as it really is, not as it appears to be in home countries.

In fact, news stations have proven to be able to shape the different political views of the masses by showing events that happen all over the world from their own perspectives.

The mere choice of a word can induce the viewer to either like or dislike a group or an event. The examples are abundant.

The first time I heard the term “djihadist” to point to the Islamic militants, I was amazed by the power of media to shape national conscience.

Besides the negative sound of an –ist word – remember fascist, communist, nationalist – the word was coined to make a distinction between “djihadists”, the current bad people that are fighting democracy and freedom values, and “moujahideen”, the same people actually but who, prior to 1990, were the good guys and freedom fighters resisting the communist enemy and its occupation of Afghanistan.

I would say that the objective is definitely to dissociate the two images of the same group in the mindset of the viewers.

This dissociation is a necessary condition to avoid having to explain the paradox that the enemy today are the same people who were considered “freedom fighters” in the 1980s and were provided with the logistic support needed to create the network which was later transformed into today’s terror network.

Furthermore, media need to understand the complexities of the world and drop the simplifications that arouse from an orientalist set of mind.

Take the example of the coverage of Iraq. The American media have been constantly hammering that the Iraqi population is composed of three monolithic blocs only: Arab Shiites, Arab Sunnis, and Kurds. Not only this constant hammering shows a short-sightedness in understanding the Arab world, but is also contributing in creating a new reality.

Iraqis, being treated as three monolithic groups, are starting to behave as such.

The persistence in understanding Iraq as described above leads to missing a scoop in the news.

Not a single American network reported what looked like a secular uprising in the southern city of Basra, the second biggest Iraqi city with the highest Shiite population density, against the hegemony of the extremists that follow the radical cleric Muqtada Al-Sadr.

The story was as follows: Students from Al-Basra University went out for a picnic at the Andalus Park only to discover that Sadr’s gangs, who had self-appointed themselves as the religious police enforcing the implementation of al-Sharia, assaulted these peaceful students on the claims that the picnic did not observe the rules of male-female segregation.

The confrontation between Sadr’s armed gangs and the students led to 15 casualties among the students who, determined not to give in to Sadr’s rules, rallied for a couple of massive demonstrations in the days that followed.

The whole episode of these courageous young people revolting against the thugs trying to enforce Islam in Basra deserved world attention. Instead, the story didn’t feature on CNN or Al-Jazeera and was merited a couple of lines only in the bottom of a regular Iraq news coverage story in the leading New York Times.

In fact, the news were only reported in alternative media because CNN was busy creating the truth that Iraqis are divided along the lines of three monolithic blocks while Al-Jazeera was busy confirming this new truth.

Talking about reporting the news and the beat on the Iraqi street? The prophecy is actually becoming true: If you haven’t seen it on CNN (and I would add al-Jazeera for the Arabs), it hasn’t happened.

Meanwhile, the American media was most of the time disconnected from world news. As the world was looking at the Independence Uprising in Lebanon and the unfolding events in Iraq, CNN, Fox News and other mainstream media were busy reporting the last days of Terry Schiavo and the never ending trial of pop star Michael Jackson to find out with Jackson had actually molested underage males or not.

As long as networks, news stations, and other media remain prisoners of their national perspectives and caged in their national mindset, a truly global media will remain a long-term dream.