JULY 20, 2000  This months’ issue of Digital Studio magazine featured an essay by Adham Center Director Abdallah Schleifer on Arab talk shows and television journalism. The full text follows.

Looks That Deceive

Looks can be deceiving. Right now the mood among Western journalists taking a fleeting look at the new Arab public affairs talk shows that have become the popular throughout the region in all their variations is upbeat and amazingly positive. A new world of free speech is dawning in the region and according to the columns appearing in the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune and other arbiters of global opinion, most of the credit goes to Al Jazeera channel. Well, there are a number of ironies right there.

Al-Jazeera does deserve credit but not for all of the waves in free speech forums it is allegedly making. I will reserve acknowledging the stations very real accomplishments to the end, in order to put this piece into proper perspective.

In fact the trail-breaking public affairs talk show program has been on the air for years, indeed several years before al-Jazeera. I allude to Emad al-Deeb’s Ala El Hawa (“On the Air”) on Orbit in which the veteran journalist (the bold rendering of the word “journalist” is intentional) with years al Al-Ahram and a nearly day-by-day active “news consultant” role at the ABC News bureau in the late seventies and early eighties, plus the experience of working with the international Arab press in London and then back in Cairo to establish Alam al Youm (conceivably the best daily newspaper in the Arab World), provided the edge for what he accomplished. What he did was borrow a successful formula, that “The Larry King Show.” But while anyone with eyes for a successful vehicle can borrow (indeed on might say most if not all development of any art medium or medium of expression is based on creative borrowing and further elaboration) few are necessarily qualified to apply format or formula with intelligence, relevance and the ability to elaborate. Precisely because Emad ad Dib is an experienced and intelligent journalist, who has interacted in a world with international standards, he could do so and treat his guests with respect, however “hard-ball” his questioning might be.

And that is but a couple of the problems with the rage for Arab talk shows. Many hosts, in contrast, are not necessarily as well prepared. According to the first woman anchor in American television, Marciarose, veteran TV journalists and initiator of the serious “public affairs” talk show format back in the late nineteen sixties (who recently lectured at the AUC), the secret of interviewing and serious talk show hosting, is “research, research, and research.” Nor is “respect” and “dignity” necessarily apparent as the model for these talk shows drifts from “The Larry King Show” to “Oprah” and various other American and British TV daytime horrors of ill-mannered confrontation, in which interrupting fellow guests, shouting, violent gesticulation just short of actual violence, has become increasingly common and regretfully popular.

Regretful not just for the vulgarity that is cheerfully migrating from the West to the Arab East (that may be in the nature of things, if we look at most patterns of cultural migration: my AUC students are up on MTV and oblivious to Dante or Umar Ibn Faard for that matter) but also because the whole justification for the public affairs talk show with its aura of free speech, is presumably not to titillate or provide a viewer ship with the intellectual equivalent of TV wrestling, but rather to instill an informed public opinion, as a requirement or hallmark of civil society and the democratic experience. And the drift of TV talk shows, while theoretically opening up new channels of public discourse on previously taboo subjects of social import, to quote the favorable literature, is receding away from opinion that is informed to opinion that is sensationalist.

Where is all of this going? Its interesting to not what happened at a seminar held at the Middle East Institute at Columbia University earlier this year under the title “Opening the Channels: Columbia Forum on Television and Society in the Middle East”. At the seminar, in which some of the most outstanding talk show hosts in the Arab world (Sami Hadad of Al Jazeera, Moataz Demmurdash of MBC News, Hala Sirhan of ART but not unfortunately Emad al-Deeb or Egypt TV’s Hamdi Kandeel) participated, a seminar in which the mood was distinctly self-congratulatory, the only troubled, critical note was struck by the very thoughtful American movie star, Richard Dreyfus, whose foundation funded the seminar. Dreyfus noted how the talk show, at least in America, has been one of the major forces in the destruction of good manners, dignity and decency in contemporary culture. Going on to talk of the fostering violent confrontation in the name of free debate, and embarrassing personal confessions of personal vices that civilization in all times and places considers unspeakable (as once upon a time, we spoke, even in America of “unspeakable crimes” and “news that is fit to print.”)

Opinions are a dime a dozen. It’s an intellectual vice that the modern Arab world suffers from. Presumably what makes an opinion informed and thereby contributes to informed public opinion is the acquisition at least of relevant and substantial fact, and ideally of knowledge and wisdom. These ingredients of an informed opinion must be sought, and in the case of contemporary events, that means real journalism and serious field reporting. By which I mean a journalist who has researched the historic background of the ongoing event and then goes off into the field to report on the unfolding event.

In the Arab East there was never any TV journalism until the Gulf War. Cameramen would cover official events, editing their footage in camera, footage which would then be screened, while the newsreader would read wire copy from the official news agency that approximated the event without any organic relationship of image and voice that is intrinsic to an edited TV news report script. There were reasons for this.

Firstly, the field report or “spot” which requires a correspondent with reporting, field producing, writing and narrating skills is a relatively new art form dating back perhaps to the fifties and it is relatively expensive, compared to the way news reports were, and on many of the national channels, still are, assembled and broadcast.

Secondly, TV news broadcasting in the Arab world do not even have the tradition of privately owned journalism as was the case of Arab print journalism prior to the nationalizations in the extreme politicalisation and partnership of Arab news media from the mid-fifties and particularly the early sixties on.

And part of the problem is the tradition of press partisanship, in which holding the correct opinion and spinning instant coffee shop analysis of distant events was more historically appropriate. That is, given the region’s cultural history in which journalism evolved from the French tradition of partisan journalism married to the Levantine fondness for belles lettres adab literature rather than the alternative Arab literary tradition of hadith studies, sacred reporting, with its almost obsessive stress on reliable sourcing and research to ensure objective accounts of what the Prophet Muhammed really said and did. A tradition that would have interacted very well indeed with the alternative historic Western model: Anglo-American business journalism with its own, if more worldly stress on objectivity and accuracy. Perhaps that is one of the factors that contribute to our growing sense of the Gulf, and in particular the Emirates and most particularly Dubai as increasingly viable alternative center of Arab media gravity.

Now I realize there are other reasons like Dubai’s history as an open trading society interacting easily with India and Iran as well as the West and the quiet and modest sense of confidence based on real accomplishments that historic experience has generated in the Dubai-Emirati elite. But also it is the relative freedom from that Levantine culture that so fixed Egypt and Fertile Crescent journalism into that mode where florid style, assertive opinion and “self expression” took precedence over hard fact and a detached sense of what was real. It cannot be a coincidence that it is Dubai society which produces such an extraordinary figure as Sheikh Mohammed – warrior, poet and media and Internet pioneer.

During the Beirut civil war (1975-76) which I covered intensively for NBC News, I noticed almost total absence of Arab journalists, aside from the Lebanese press reporting on their own tragedy. The Lebanese civil war was the biggest Arab world news story of the year but nearly nobody bothered to send a correspondent to dig in and cover that war save Rose al-Yousef magazine. Aside from marginal issues like the expense, the absence of life and disability insurance at the time for Arab journalist who might have been willing to go otherwise, the real reason was that it simply wasn’t necessary. If the paramount importance in journalism was correct opinion rather than acquired fact for an informed opinion, then why bother going?

But perhaps the most important problem has been the parochial nature of television. An Arab print journalist, even in the worst years of state censorship generally still had access to The Times, Le Monde, The New York Times which gave him or her something of a sense of internationally recognized standards, of the paramount importance of accuracy and of the obvious fruits of research. But until the age of satellites, which in the Arab world is but ten years, television transmission had a range of only 50 miles which meant the Arab TV Broadcaster often with no experience in print journalism and limited if any travel abroad, simply had no idea what international standards based on the experiences of free TV journalism, were. There could be no creative borrowing and adaptation.

The Gulf War and the sudden access throughout the region to CNN coverage, for all its weaknesses and alleged partisanships, changed all of this. The creation of MBC was the first response and to this day MBC with its expensively constructed news bureaus throughout the Arab world as well as in major global capitals has consistently provided the region with news shows built around its own field reports that meet international standards.

BBC Arabic News was the next entry. Not as successful as MBC, if only because too much of the material was simply BBC reports, translated and turned-around for editing, BBC Arabic News very much met international production standards and as such was a very positive experience. But it lacked the warmth or cultural relevance of MBC news and that lack of sensitivity to cultural relevance was one of the factors that contributed to its sad demise.

The banner of Arab TV news at international standards has also been picked up elsewhere. Nile TV English language news under the formative leadership of Hassan Hamid took major steps to introducing the field report formula on Egyptian TV, as has ANN and the most recent satellite broadcaster, Dubai Business News. But it is here where Al Jazeera deserves particular credit: supporting the award-winning investigative journalism efforts of its London bureau chief Yousri Fouda and his colleagues generating field reporting; reporting which has done far more for developing an informed public opinion than most talk shows put together.

All this progress in the development of an authentic Arab TV journalism that meets international standards has been overshadowed of late by the glamour and glitz of the talk shows.

They are conveniently far less expensive to produce than sustained, day-in, day-out field journalism, they deflect attention from that very journalistic life stream of informed public opinion and they too often appeal to a popular taste for sensationalism and confrontation that is already, in its most extreme form, taking a terrible toll in the moral and aesthetic sensibilities of the West.