Where the Street Gets its Meat
By Callimachus | Related entries in Media, The WorldMohamed Elmenshawy, editor in chief of a new Arabic-language news and information service sponsored by the World Security Institute, points out that the Arab world’s view of America is skewed, in part, by the 50 or so Washington correspondents for the (mostly state-owned) media outlets that dominate the Middle East.
That this small cadre of correspondents exerts such broad influence on the so-called “Arab street” would be less objectionable if their reporting were informed and objective. Instead, Arab media coverage of the United States and its policies reflects the correspondents’ limited understanding of the country and its history and creates a skewed image of the United States and its policies among Arabs.
The shallowness of the coverage is due in large part to the insularity of the Washington-based Arab journalists. Reporters rarely, if ever, travel outside Washington, leaving them ill-prepared to cover such heartland issues as the teaching of creationism in Kansas schools or the battle over immigration in Texas.
These issues are of interest to Arab audiences, the Kansas debate because it highlights the tension between America’s religious and secular traditions, the Texas case because it shows that Americans’ wariness of immigrants extends beyond Arabs and Muslims.
Yet these and other important stories go unreported in the Arab media. Most correspondents report exclusively on Beltway matters, reflecting an attitude expressed by an Al Jazeera reporter at a recent media conference in Washington who said, “It does not really matter what is going on in Seattle or San Francisco.”
Some coverage, moreover, merely recycles reports from major American newspapers, replacing nuanced analysis with allusions to familiar themes. A reworked article about U.S. aid to Israel, for example, might trim discussion of the policy debate and instead emphasize the influence of Jewish groups or evangelical Christians on the Bush administration.
Such reporting clouds readers’ understanding of the American decision-making process while furthering the conspiracy theories that circulate so widely in the Arab world.
Funny, though, when I was reading about the correspondents who never leave their bases in the capital, keep their prejudices close at handm and yet pretend to tell their people what really is going on in the whole country, i thought of the legacy media press corps in Baghdad.
[Hat tip, Barcepundit]
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November 11th, 2005 at 12:02 pm
I wonder how much coverage they give to stories involving American Arabs and Muslims, like the North Carolina case involving a Muslim who wants to be able to testify upon a Qur’an (which NC state law currently forbids) or the sociopolitical landscape in places like Detroit-metro, with especially large Arab/Muslim populations. Do Middle Easterners follow these stories too, and if so, how do they affect their view of America?
November 11th, 2005 at 4:22 pm
My suspicion is, these kind of stories never get heard over there, at least not in the native media. I can’t read Arabic, but the English-language editions of al Jazeera and other publications don’t write about such matters. The Elmenshawy piece also goes on to point out how the U.S.-sponsored media outlets in the Arab world have made little headway.