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The Oscars and Public Diplomacy



The Oscars and Public Diplomacy

Feb 28, 05 at 7:04 pm.
The Oscars and Public Diplomacy art


The Oscars wrapped up a bit before 7am over here and I crawled off to grab a few hours sleep after the school bus picked up my teenage daughter. Neither of us usually gets up at three in the morning to watch television, but the Oscars are something rare: a cultural moment we can share with the rest of America, in real time. We almost missed it because of a problem with our satellite dish, and because I had not noticed that the long-time holder of the ceremony’s Middle East broadcast rights, MBC2, had lost the telecast to a new rival channel, One TV. Luckily the repairman showed up Sunday both to fix our reception and to add One TV to our channel list. I spent a good chunk of yesterday phoning friends who work in TV out in the Emirates trying, without success, to figure out how much One TV paid to get the Oscars away from MBC. An inattentive viewer, however, might not even have noticed that MBC has lost the rights. MBC was airing so much pre and post-Oscar programming that its lack of the ceremony itself seemed almost a minor issue. All this is a useful reminder that at this moment when ‘America’ is deeply unpopular in this part of the world, much that is ‘American’ remains both much desired and difficult to escape. MBC and One TV are perfect illustrations of this. Both stations are based in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, are seen throughout the region and compete for viewers with steady streams of American fare. One TV offers “CSI”, “Law and Order”, “The Sopranos” and (I swear I’m not making this up) “The Bold & the Beautiful” against MBC’s longtime line-up of “Seinfeld”, “Frazier”, “Buffy, the Vampire Slayer” and Oprah. On both stations the shows air with subtitles. The ads during the commercial breaks, however, are entirely in Arabic. And that only covers the free-to-air channels. If one is willing to shell out $30-$60 a month there is a lot more American TV buzzing around the ether. While it is true that American shows have long been a fixture here, the current fare is a far cry from a generation ago when Egyptian TV’s only English-language series were five year old episodes of “Falcon Crest” while the Saudis offered decade-old reruns of “CHiPS”. The latest twist in the programming war, however, is news. About a month ago MBC launched a new channel, MBC4, to which it moved all of its American series. The long-established MBC2 channel became an all-English-language-movies station. Faced with the need to fill hours of extra airtime every day on MBC4 programmers opted not for more reruns, but for news. As weird as this may sound, viewers around the region can now catch ABC’s “Good Morning, America” and “World News Tonight” and CBS’s “The Early Show” and “CBS Evening News” every single day. MBC4 also shows “60 Minutes”, “48 Hours” and “20/20”. The Oscars, I understand. “Friends” I understand. But “Good Morning, America”? “There’s a lot of interest in what is being said in America and this interest does not lie with the people watching ‘Friends’,” a long-time, and well-connected, Gulf observer said. “It lies with people who went to school in the States and important people in the government. They want to know what this congressman is saying to that congressman and what’s on the agenda over there.” He pointed out that the market for American broadcast news had been established by the pay-service Orbit, which offers a 24 hour news channel cobbled together from the three US broadcast networks and Fox. Orbit News proved that elites would pay to see “Face the Nation” and “Fox News Sunday”, he said, so why not see if people would watch “World News Tonight” if it was offered for free? All this is a sign that public diplomacy is not just about what the government does, and may not even be primarily the government’s doing. It is a reminder to our politicians that they are addressing the world, even when they think they are talking only to the folks back home. It is proof, if we needed any, that the public diplomacy paradigms of the Cold War need to be rethought in the 21st century. grr


The Oscars and Public Diplomacy

Feb 28, 05 at 7:04 pm.
The Oscars and Public Diplomacy art


The Oscars wrapped up a bit before 7am over here and I crawled off to grab a few hours sleep after the school bus picked up my teenage daughter. Neither of us usually gets up at three in the morning to watch television, but the Oscars are something rare: a cultural moment we can share with the rest of America, in real time. We almost missed it because of a problem with our satellite dish, and because I had not noticed that the long-time holder of the ceremony’s Middle East broadcast rights, MBC2, had lost the telecast to a new rival channel, One TV. Luckily the repairman showed up Sunday both to fix our reception and to add One TV to our channel list. I spent a good chunk of yesterday phoning friends who work in TV out in the Emirates trying, without success, to figure out how much One TV paid to get the Oscars away from MBC. An inattentive viewer, however, might not even have noticed that MBC has lost the rights. MBC was airing so much pre and post-Oscar programming that its lack of the ceremony itself seemed almost a minor issue. All this is a useful reminder that at this moment when ‘America’ is deeply unpopular in this part of the world, much that is ‘American’ remains both much desired and difficult to escape. MBC and One TV are perfect illustrations of this. Both stations are based in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, are seen throughout the region and compete for viewers with steady streams of American fare. One TV offers “CSI”, “Law and Order”, “The Sopranos” and (I swear I’m not making this up) “The Bold & the Beautiful” against MBC’s longtime line-up of “Seinfeld”, “Frazier”, “Buffy, the Vampire Slayer” and Oprah. On both stations the shows air with subtitles. The ads during the commercial breaks, however, are entirely in Arabic. And that only covers the free-to-air channels. If one is willing to shell out $30-$60 a month there is a lot more American TV buzzing around the ether. While it is true that American shows have long been a fixture here, the current fare is a far cry from a generation ago when Egyptian TV’s only English-language series were five year old episodes of “Falcon Crest” while the Saudis offered decade-old reruns of “CHiPS”. The latest twist in the programming war, however, is news. About a month ago MBC launched a new channel, MBC4, to which it moved all of its American series. The long-established MBC2 channel became an all-English-language-movies station. Faced with the need to fill hours of extra airtime every day on MBC4 programmers opted not for more reruns, but for news. As weird as this may sound, viewers around the region can now catch ABC’s “Good Morning, America” and “World News Tonight” and CBS’s “The Early Show” and “CBS Evening News” every single day. MBC4 also shows “60 Minutes”, “48 Hours” and “20/20”. The Oscars, I understand. “Friends” I understand. But “Good Morning, America”? “There’s a lot of interest in what is being said in America and this interest does not lie with the people watching ‘Friends’,” a long-time, and well-connected, Gulf observer said. “It lies with people who went to school in the States and important people in the government. They want to know what this congressman is saying to that congressman and what’s on the agenda over there.” He pointed out that the market for American broadcast news had been established by the pay-service Orbit, which offers a 24 hour news channel cobbled together from the three US broadcast networks and Fox. Orbit News proved that elites would pay to see “Face the Nation” and “Fox News Sunday”, he said, so why not see if people would watch “World News Tonight” if it was offered for free? All this is a sign that public diplomacy is not just about what the government does, and may not even be primarily the government’s doing. It is a reminder to our politicians that they are addressing the world, even when they think they are talking only to the folks back home. It is proof, if we needed any, that the public diplomacy paradigms of the Cold War need to be rethought in the 21st century. grr


Now that the votes are counted…

Feb 26, 05 at 4:19 pm.
Now that the votes are counted… art


Iraq’s election went off better than expected. Now that the results have been announced the hard part begins. Though Ibrahim Al-Jafaari’s emergence as the prime ministerial candidate of the United Iraqi Alliance makes him the leading contender to head the country’s next government his grasp on the levers of power remains far from certain. The Shia-led UIA emerged with a thin majority in the 275 seat National Assembly, but it is far short of the two-thirds needed to form a government. This is especially the case since the UIA is hardly a cohesive block. It is hard to imagine any grouping containing both Abdel Aziz Al-Hakim, the leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, and Ahmed Chalabi holding together for long. The current Prime Minister, Iyad Allawi (a secular Shiite) is openly courting some of its members in a bid to keep his job. The Kurds appear to be watching all of this warily. Their role, or lack of it, in the new government will be a key indicator of the country’s future. Kurdistan’s two main parties fought the election as a single slate. When facing the rest of Iraq their leadership is relatively united and pretty clear about what it wants. For now their list of demands does not include breaking up the country, but there is little doubt they will do so if they feel that is the only way to preserve the society they have built in northern Iraq over the last dozen years To no one’s surprise there are virtually no Sunnis in the assembly. President Ghazi al-Yawr’s list managed only five seats. How the Sunni political class, and the Sunni population at large, deal with this will be one of the great unknowns of the coming months. An intriguing titbit came from an Iraqi friend of mine, a journalist who comes from one of the larger and more important Sunni tribes. A few days after the election he told me he could have voted in relative safety because he works in the Green Zone, but chose not to do so out of solidarity with his neighbors in the overwhelmingly Sunni district of Abu Gharib, on Baghdad’s western outskirts. Many of his neighbors, he said, wanted to vote but thought it was simply too dangerous to do so. He says he does expect them to vote in October when the new constitution is put to a referendum. If his reading of his neighbors is correct this is a particularly good sign, and one that reinforces the emerging conventional wisdom that Sunni leaders may now believe their boycotts were shortsighted. The real question is whether the leaders who are now emerging with some electoral legitimacy can deal with each other with a measure of maturity, farsightedness and statesmanship. The, admittedly short, history of Iraq’s emerging political class does not inspire much confidence on this score, but the election was a surprise, so things might go better than expected. Writing a new constitution by October is going to be a tall order. Getting it approved in a vote a month later may be even harder, especially since a two-thirds ‘no’ vote in any three provinces sends the entire process back to the drawing board. It is going to be a long spring and summer in Iraq – but one well worth watching. grr


Now that the votes are counted…

Feb 26, 05 at 4:19 pm.
Now that the votes are counted… art


Iraq’s election went off better than expected. Now that the results have been announced the hard part begins. Though Ibrahim Al-Jafaari’s emergence as the prime ministerial candidate of the United Iraqi Alliance makes him the leading contender to head the country’s next government his grasp on the levers of power remains far from certain. The Shia-led UIA emerged with a thin majority in the 275 seat National Assembly, but it is far short of the two-thirds needed to form a government. This is especially the case since the UIA is hardly a cohesive block. It is hard to imagine any grouping containing both Abdel Aziz Al-Hakim, the leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, and Ahmed Chalabi holding together for long. The current Prime Minister, Iyad Allawi (a secular Shiite) is openly courting some of its members in a bid to keep his job. The Kurds appear to be watching all of this warily. Their role, or lack of it, in the new government will be a key indicator of the country’s future. Kurdistan’s two main parties fought the election as a single slate. When facing the rest of Iraq their leadership is relatively united and pretty clear about what it wants. For now their list of demands does not include breaking up the country, but there is little doubt they will do so if they feel that is the only way to preserve the society they have built in northern Iraq over the last dozen years To no one’s surprise there are virtually no Sunnis in the assembly. President Ghazi al-Yawr’s list managed only five seats. How the Sunni political class, and the Sunni population at large, deal with this will be one of the great unknowns of the coming months. An intriguing titbit came from an Iraqi friend of mine, a journalist who comes from one of the larger and more important Sunni tribes. A few days after the election he told me he could have voted in relative safety because he works in the Green Zone, but chose not to do so out of solidarity with his neighbors in the overwhelmingly Sunni district of Abu Gharib, on Baghdad’s western outskirts. Many of his neighbors, he said, wanted to vote but thought it was simply too dangerous to do so. He says he does expect them to vote in October when the new constitution is put to a referendum. If his reading of his neighbors is correct this is a particularly good sign, and one that reinforces the emerging conventional wisdom that Sunni leaders may now believe their boycotts were shortsighted. The real question is whether the leaders who are now emerging with some electoral legitimacy can deal with each other with a measure of maturity, farsightedness and statesmanship. The, admittedly short, history of Iraq’s emerging political class does not inspire much confidence on this score, but the election was a surprise, so things might go better than expected. Writing a new constitution by October is going to be a tall order. Getting it approved in a vote a month later may be even harder, especially since a two-thirds ‘no’ vote in any three provinces sends the entire process back to the drawing board. It is going to be a long spring and summer in Iraq – but one well worth watching. grr


Changing the Subject

Feb 17, 05 at 6:58 pm.
Changing the Subject art


I’ve spent a day here in the suburbs of Los Angeles talking about the Middle East with students and faculty at my alma mater, Pomona College. The really interesting thing is that while I came to talk about Iraq, I keep getting asked about Israel and the Palestinians. Add in Monday’s assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri and Iraq, the constant topic of the last two years, seems to have vanished from the agenda, at least for a moment. The thing about living in the Middle East in general, and in Amman in particular, is that Iraq has a way of looming over nearly every conversation. Amman is the way station for virtually everyone traveling to or from Baghdad. The city is filled with exiles from street vendors to wealthy merchants. On both Arab satellite television and on CNN it is the first story in a generation that has managed to push the Israeli-Palestinian conflict off center-stage for more than a few weeks. Any yet in the four days I have been in the United States people have asked me about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at least twice as often as about Iraq. What is happening here? Has the carnage in Baghdad numbed us to the story? Is the daily news from Iraq so repetitive that people have finally tuned out and moved on (as for popular media, I gave up on the radio on the drive out from Los Angeles this morning after finding every talk radio outlet – including Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly – talking about the Michael Jackson trial)? If one accepts the (in my opinion overly narrow) definition of public diplomacy as the selling of the administration’s policies then this, I suppose, must be counted a victory. But it is dangerous to assume that if Americans are not paying attention then no one else is. That surely would be a gross misreading of the situation. Iraq is a long-term project, both our involvement there per se and undoing the damage our adventure there has done to our image in the wider world. It is important to talk about what we are doing – or at least what we think we are doing – as long as this mess continues. grr


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