US Coverage of the Middle East
Are We Getting the Full Picture?

What kind of picture are American readers, listeners, and viewers getting on the Middle East? Are they getting the whole picture?

Two experienced journalists—one from the United States and one based in Lebanon—addressed that question recently on a public radio program called Global Journalist, hosted by University of Missouri journalism professor Stuart Loory.

Jon Sawyer, who reported from more than 60 countries during a three-decade career at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, is the director of the newly established Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting in Washington, DC. Habib Battah is managing editor of the Beirut-based Journal of Middle East Broadcasters and has been a print and broadcast journalist for some of the Arab world's leading news organizations including Qatar-based Al Jazeera.

The two journalists met during a journalism training workshop in Beirut last fall, an initiative cosponsored by the Reuters and Stanley foundations. Below are excerpts of their interview on the Global Journalist program. Full audio of the interview is available online at www.globaljournalist.org.

Global Journalist: President Bush and his administration are embarked on major programs to convince the American public that the right things are being done in Iraq and that the news business has it all wrong. What do you think?

Habib Battah: I think coverage of the Middle East is primarily negative and focused on violence. No matter what Bush might be saying, the message that I'm seeing on American airwaves is very close to the administration's message. Most of the sources we see, the pundits, are actually American officials or former military officials. I feel many news outlets—MSNBC, CNN, Fox—have become a retirement program for American military officials, where they are often featured as so-called analysts.

The use of sources is often coloring the coverage to the extent where the Middle East seems to be a big strategic map with a big question mark over it—and the question is primarily, "How can we stop this breeding ground of terrorists?" So the coverage to me is very one-dimensional.

Jon Sawyer: I think it's ironic that we've had this criticism from the administration at this stage in the war given the role that the media played in the run-up to the war—at which point I think the media did us a grave disservice. It's basically cheerleading for the administration and the acceptance of administration claims as to weapons of mass destruction, the ties to Al Qaeda in Iraq, and that war was inevitable and necessary and that we had to fight. I think if we had had a different media, a more challenging media back three years ago, we would have seen a very different sequence of events since.

GJ: Is the same kind of reporting being done by the Arab press in the Middle East?

Battah: There aren't that many journalists today going out to the fields and really investigating the whole story. The Dubai ports story, for example, seemed to be framed once again by the official US viewpoint. There seemed to be a certain number of congressmen—such as Representative Peter King of New York—saying that Al Qaeda has a strong presence in Dubai, and another congressman saying it has a serious and dubious history as a transit point of terrorism. So this became the main focus of the story. I was just hoping, at a minimum, for a Google search of Dubai: what is this country, and why, out of 30 countries being taken over by Dubai Ports World, was the United States the only one to reject this takeover? Dubai is one of the most fascinating cities in the world today. It's really a country that is open to investment, though a lot of pundits said it was an authoritarian country with a closed economy. We also have a 100,000 British people living in Dubai. These are all angles we didn't see explored.

GJ: The implication of what both of you are saying is that the American news business is out of touch when it comes to really covering the Middle East, because it doesn't understand the Middle East. It hasn't backgrounded itself well on the culture, the religion, the history. Is that so? And if it's so, is it too late to do something about it?

Sawyer: It's true all over the world. It's a function of the rapidly declining numbers of correspondents we have out in the field. Right now there are many in Iraq because that's the big story. Of course, most of them are confined to the Green Zone or areas where they can't get out and report. So you have the classic situation where a bunch of reporters are chasing the same story and they can't actually get out and do classic reporting. In most of the world, there are hardly any reporters left.

GJ: Habib, you said you thought the American news business was not doing a good job covering the war in Iraq and you say they are basically being spokespeople for the United States government. The US government also says the news business is not doing a good job. They say it is not reporting all of the positive developments—the rebuilding of the infrastructure, educational system, and police force. Who's right?

Battah: When you watch the American coverage—for example, on Fox News, when they have this graphic that says, "Iraq: A Nation Reborn"—I can see they're trying to push an agenda that says things are actually not that bad. If you watch Fox News, the economy is good and there's progress in Iraq. When you watch international news outlets like BBC or even CNN International you see that there is a terrible hell going on in Iraq today. It's kind of hard to force a few positive developments onto that. I believe Iraq is the most dangerous country in the world today for a journalist, and that's been documented. There's no sense in giving a rosy picture of this.

GJ: Actually I think we have hundreds of American reporters in Iraq at any time. Most of them are embedded with American forces. Does that help to get the administration's view across to the American public? Is the embedding process responsible for this?

Sawyer: I think that was very true in the first months of the war. I think embedding was one of the most brilliant, slickest media manipulations every conceived and executed by an administration. It had the effect, as one writer said, of a thousand straws of coverage. Where you had a thousand individual straws, each straw in one unit where you were writing very vivid, poignant stories about heroic young American men and women trying their hardest, fighting, risking their lives—and yet learning nothing about the overall context. And so you have the entire media's investment of tens of millions of dollars, which didn't really tell you anything important about what was going to happen three months, six months down the road.

A recent Zogby poll—the first extensive poll done of American servicemen and women in Iraq—showed that 65 or 70 percent said there is no good conclusion in Iraq, that we should simply leave in the next year, and that we were not going to be able to prevail. Those are our men and women who are fighting there, so I don't think there's a way you can arrange American media coverage to make that story look better than it is.

—Loren Keller