Adham Center News

TBS 10: "Covering the Coverage" of the Iraq War

Never before in the history of warfare has the coverage-and in particular the transnational television coverage-attracted as much attention and fierce debate as that of the recent conflict in Iraq. The impact of television journalism on that coverage, far out of proportion to the actual number of television journalists in relation to all journalists (print and still photo) participating, is reflected in the way the issues posed by television journalism have dominated the discourse.

Issue 10 of the Adham Center's Transnational Broadcasting Studies Journal, the Middle East's only on-line publication dedicated to the study of satellite television, went on-line April 17, 2003, taking "Covering the Coverage" - the media, and the media's own reaction to the media-as its main theme.

Informal reports by Maggie Zanger (of AUC's Journalism and Mass Communications department) and Chris Gray of the BBC bring alive the day-to-day experience of the professional journalist in Northern Iraq, while BBC veteran John Simpson's report immediately following the friendly-fire bombing in which his translator was killed reminds the reader of the very real dangers to which journalists were exposed.

TBS senior editor S. Abdallah Schleifer went to the heart of US military, and Arab satellite, communications in the Gulf and talked both to the official spokespeople and the CEOs and/or News Directors, such as Muhammad Jasim al Ali, Ibrahim Helal (Al Jazeera), Ahmed al Ali and Nart Bouran (Abu Dhabi TV), and Salah Negm (Al Arabiya), as well as APTN's Ian Ritchie. Technical and logistical sides of reporting the war receive attention as well, with pieces on "New Compression Technologies" (by David Cass) and their role in war-time reporting and how Video Cairo Sat, one of the region's main service providers, coped with the special demands (by Noha El-Hennawi).

TBS 10 also looks at how the media have dealt with the war in a number of countries and from a number of viewpoints. Brian McNair reports on what British viewers saw, in "The Iraq War As Seen In Britain: UK Satellite Coverage." Coverage from the Arab World has been viewed as both impacting on and reflecting the concerns of those most immediately affected by the war, but neither the coverage itself not the response to it was monolithic. Four articles each provide a part of the larger picture of the highly diversified Arab media. Hussein Amin reviews some of the responses of viewers in the region in "Watching the War in the Arab World," while Abbas Al Tonsi's "Impressions Of An Arab Viewer On The Satellite Coverage Of The So-Called 'War On Iraq'"' delivers a mordant judgment on both the performance of the Arab channels and the environment in which they operate. In "A Palestinian Perspective on Satellite Television Coverage of the Iraq War," In'am El-Obeidi contextualizes and dissects the peculiar intensity with which viewers on the West Bank and in Gaza receive news of the war, and Janet Fine's "Al Jazeera Winning TV Credibility War" looks at the ratings wars among the Arab channels.

The Western and Arab media were not, however, the only ones watching how events transpired in Iraq. Dilruba Catalbas's "Divided and Confused: The Reporting of the First Two Weeks of the War in Iraq on Turkish Television Channels" and Christine Ogan's "Big Turkish Media and the War" assess the response of the relatively new satellite channels in a country intimately involved, though not on the front line. India, though not itself a party to the war, India stands to win or lose much from it; Janet Fine documents how the distant drama has impacted on the development of the media in "Covering the Iraq War in India."

TBS 10 also provides a provisional archive of the media's own reactions to the coverage in "Media on Media," which offers 26 articles from the world's press in which journalists analyze, praise, and attack the war coverage of their fellows. Before these, however, in "Moral Dilemmas of the Press," TBS places two pieces that highlight the potential cost to ordinary people of the media's actions. "'Friendly Fire?'- the Peter Arnett Affair" provides Peter Arnett's and NBC's own accounts of an incident that exposed and tested the "red lines" of Western journalism. "Credo of a Crouching Couch Potato," by TBS managing editor Humphrey Davies provides a highly personal reaction to the unending flood of coverage.

TBS 10 does not neglect other things that were going on in the rest of the TV satellite world this spring. In Issues and Developments, Bella Thomas questions the received wisdom on "cultural hegemony" when she discusses "What the World's Poor Watch on TV." Monal Zeidan reports on changes at a major actor in the regional market in "New Moves for Showtime," while Janet Fine notes an anniversary in "Globalization of Indian Satellite TV Marks 25 Years," and Chris Forrester discusses the latest development in entertainment-related gadgetry in "Could SatMode Be Satellite's 'Killer App?'. Patrick Stoddart describes News World's effort to train a new generation of journalists for the challenges ahead in "News World-the Next Generation." Those challenges were at the forefront of two important panel discussions held in 2002, for which TBS 10 provides transcripts, one under the aegis again of News World ("News World Dublin - Countdown to Conflict")-a piece that makes especially interesting reading now that the war has been fought and reported-and the other organized by NewsXchange ("New Media Realities in the Middle East") and dealing with that other conflict, in Palestine, which has done so much to prepare the media for Iraq. TBS 10's Conference Report covers an event that saw many preliminary skirmishes in the battle for media autonomy that was later to be played out in earnest in Iraq ("News World Dublin, November 2002 by Janet Key").

Despite all this sturm und drang, TBS is still able to find room for Academic Papers that can stand back and look at some aspects of the broader context. Christa Salamandra provides an ethnography of "London's Arab Media and the Construction of Arabness." Dilruba Catalbas examines the interactions of Turkish and US satellite broadcasters in "'Glocalization'" - a Case History: Commercial Partnerships and Cooperation between Turkish and American Satellite Broadcasters" and Mohammed el-Nawawy and Leo A. Gher discuss Al Jazeera's potential role in the building of bridges between East and West in "Al Jazeera: Bridging the East-West Gap through Public Discourse and Media Diplomacy."

TBS 10 - the Spring-Summer issue, at www.tbsjournal.com