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In Time of Crisis, a Changing Role of the Media in Lebanon

Posted on Mar 27, 05 at 12:18 am.

As I write this it is late evening and Lebanon's Future Television is deep into its nightly talk show. Four hours, more or less, on where the country is headed. In the upper left corner of the screen a black mourning band cuts across the station's logo. Next to it is the legend "40 ... for Lebanon." The number marks the days since the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. The words are part of the Lebanese opposition's slogan: "The Truth ... for Lebanon."

Much of central Beirut is festooned with pictures of Hariri and banners calling for "The Truth." Hariri has been buried in Martyrs Square, the historical heart of the city, and the scene of some of the fiercest fighting during the civil wars that wracked Lebanon from 1975 until 1990. The demonstrations that took place in the square for nearly a month after Hariri's assassination have ceased, but Christians and Muslims continue to trek to the grave day and night, a sign that the tensions of Lebanon's war years are buried, but far from forgotten.

The media's role in all this has been extraordinary.

"TV and newspapers are not only following the news, they are part of it," says Yusef Bazzi, a columnist for Al-Mustaqbal, Future Television's sister newspaper.

It is a view seconded by Gebran Tueni, publisher of one of the country's oldest newspapers, An-Nahar. "We have a clear agenda now for the withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon .... The Syrians have been behaving very badly with all of Lebanon and now there's a snowball effect."

The weeks since the assassination have been a defining event for this country's media. "My impression is that the media has had a huge impact at several different levels. It was the vehicle that promoted mass mobilization ... providing a sense of solidarity. Even just by watching the media at home you felt fortified and you felt part of something big," says Rami Khouri, editor-at-large of the English-language Daily Star.

The effect, Khouri says, has been similar to that of the first Gulf War on CNN: bringing the young network into the big leagues, and instilling it with a sense of mission.

Future, a television station set up by Hariri in the early '90s, has stayed with the story in ways the rest have not. Its anchors are required to wear black mourning clothes and Hariri pins with blue ribbons, another symbol of Lebanon's opposition. The regular programming schedule of movies and soap operas has been abandoned, and almost any statement by an opposition political leader is carried in full.

The station's staff argue that none of this compromises their objectivity as journalists. "All Lebanese TV stations are owned by somebody. Everyone understands this," says Elsa Yazbek, an anchor/reporter at Future TV. "The first mission is we want the truth. The first mission is to keep the subject alive in the minds of the people."

"The owners of the media are politicians," Bazzi says. And objectivity? "It's very relative."

Yazbek and others come close to arguing that the media's open partisanship serves some sort of higher purpose. Her refrain, "people are not afraid anymore," is one a visitor to Beirut hears often these days.

Not all stations have taken the same approach. Hizbollah's Al-Manar television seems to do its best to minimize the opposition's activities, while Lebanon's most popular station, LBC (which is Christian-owned and is widely identified with some of the wartime Christian militia leaders) has almost completely returned to its regular schedule, which is long on soap operas and relatively thin when it comes to news.

Khouri decries a lack of "detached analysis" in the Arab media generally, something he says the performance of Lebanese newspapers and television stations has only made more glaringly obvious over the last month.

There's a dearth of balanced interpretation, he says. "They've provided a megaphone, rather than a microscope."

Memo to Karen Hughes

Posted on Mar 15, 05 at 9:43 am.

According to news reports over the weekend, President Bush plans to appoint his long-time media advisor, Karen Hughes, as the new undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs. That this post has been vacant for months, even amid general agreement that America’s image overseas is in need of a radical makeover, is itself testimony to the depth of the challenges the new undersecretary faces.

The downside of the President’s choice is Hughes’ lack of foreign policy credentials. She rose to national prominence as the chief spokeswoman for Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign. When Bush entered the White House, Hughes ceded the high-profile press secretary’s job to Ari Fleischer, opting instead for a (probably more powerful) behind-the-scenes role as counselor to the president. She left the administration to return to Austin in 2002, but is widely reported to have remained an informal advisor to Bush from her home in Texas.

This resume hints at the upside of her selection: Hughes is personally close to the president. She has his ear. He trusts her. Those facts make this, potentially, a very good appointment for the advancement of public diplomacy.

Here, then, are some things the new undersecretary may wish to keep in mind. First and foremost, this is a long-term job. When Bush talks about the need for reform in the Middle East he speaks of “generational change.” That applies as much to the U.S. and our public diplomacy efforts as it does to building a democratic and electoral culture in places like Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

Hughes needs both to broaden and to narrow the focus of her new job. Her first Bush administration predecessor, Charlotte Beers, came from Madison Avenue and erred in the belief that selling America and its policies was not fundamentally different from selling soda or laundry soap. It has become common to dismiss Beers as a failure because she failed to see that in many cases it was the policies themselves that needed to change, not the way they were sold. There is some truth in this, but it is overly simplistic.

It is true that some American policies (an unquestioning embrace of Ariel Sharon, for example) simply cannot be presented in a way that makes them palatable to the Arab World.

It is equally true that presentation has been a problem. Last year the United States sent an enormous delegation to the World Economic Forum’s regional meeting here in Jordan. A number of the delegation’s mid-level officials gave interviews to the Jordanian media that were so condescending that officials at the U.S. embassy here still wince when the subject comes up in conversation.

Similarly, it is easy to fear that Hughes, coming as she does from the world of political spin, will see public diplomacy as little more than keeping the administration ‘on-message’ overseas as well as at home. That, too, would be a misreading of the situation, though it touches on another American public diplomacy shortcoming: the inability to counter rumors and negative information quickly and forcefully.

Too often accusations or rumors appear in the morning papers in this part of the world and spend an entire day being repeated on satellite TV with no attempt at an American reply. Why? Because the reply, according to current procedure, must wait for the daily State Department news briefing. By the time the briefing takes place the TV channels of the Middle East have moved on to another news cycle, and the next day’s newspapers are in the final stages of production. For most viewers and readers the charges, therefore, go unanswered. If Hughes can bring her communications experience to bear on this aspect of public diplomacy it will be a welcome change.

Finally, we need to look carefully at the long-term, less glamorous aspects of public diplomacy. There is a glaring need, above all, for vehicles that promote American and Western culture, society and values in a neutral, non-ideological way.

The British, French, Spanish and German governments are all good at this. Want to learn French? Watch Spanish movies? Study German cooking? The Alliance Francaise, Instituto Cervantes and Goethe Institute are all happy to help you. The United States, on the other hand, has spent the last decade shutting down its fine network of libraries and cultural centers around the world. The result has been the ceding of cultural promotion to Hollywood and the commercial marketplace. Personally, I love both “24” and “Sex and the City,” but if that’s the only image of American society on offer one can understand why a lot of people find it less than appealing.

All of this is a tall order for the new undersecretary. The rest of us can only wish her well, and hope for the best.

Gordon R. Robison

Sunset ,Rig,Flare

Posted on Mar 13, 05 at 8:37 pm.

Seeking a constructive role

Posted on Mar 08, 05 at 4:20 pm.

This is an important moment in the Middle East. Events have been moving quickly in several countries around the region. The questions now are whether the momentum for reform can be sustained, and whether the United States, despite its poor reputation throughout the Arab World, can play a constructive role.

The year began with elections that went better than expected in both Iraq and the Palestinian territories, followed by voting for municipal councils in Saudi Arabia – a country whose king said a decade ago that elections were culturally inappropriate for Arabs.

What is happening now in Egypt and Lebanon, however, is potentially even more significant.

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s surprise announcement that he will allow candidates other than himself to stand in September’s presidential election was unexpected, but it has been greeted warily both at home and abroad. Everyone agrees a ballot with several candidates is fundamentally better than a ballot with only one. Exactly how much is really going to change in Egypt is, however, another question.

Symptomatic of this was a conversation I had with a prominent Egyptian over the weekend. He’s the sort of person who would surely like to see the country open up and have a freer political system. But the fact that I can’t name him, and that he was clearly reluctant to speak on the phone is a reminder of how far Egypt still has to go before it can be considered even a partially open society.

He was markedly less than enthusiastic about Mubarak’s announcement, noting that the constitutional changes making their way through Egypt’s parliament will require all presidential candidates to be approved by parliament itself, a rubber stamp body controlled by Mubarak’s National Democratic Party. Talking to Egyptians it is difficult to miss the sense that they believe they are trading one sort of stage-managed election for another. “What we really need is some kind of independent body to oversee the election,” my friend said.

For the moment the administration is saying the right things. “Egypt has now the prospect of competitive, multi-party elections,” President Bush said during a speech earlier today at the National Defense University. “Like all free elections, these require freedom of assembly, multiple candidates, free access by those candidates to the media and the right to form political parties.”

All of those are going to be key indicators of how free this election really is. It is right and appropriate that the President make it clear now, early on, that the United States will be watching.

Conventional wisdom has it that Condeleezza Rice’s cancellation of her visit to Cairo helped prompt Mubarak’s decision. “There’s a feeling that Mubarak got the Americans off his back for the moment,” offered a Cairo-based Western observer. He added that the real question is not what happens in this election, but what happens in the next one. No one questions that Mubarak will win again. The things to watch are how much openness his regime allows during this fall’s campaign and who it lets onto the ballot. This could be the thin end of the proverbial wedge.

That is where pressure, such as Bush’s remarks, can be useful. The trick is not to provoke a reaction. Beirut today saw a huge pro-Syria demonstration, organized mainly by Shiite Muslims, who make up Lebanon’s largest single confessional group. The gist of their argument was that foreign governments (by which they mainly meant the United States and France) should not interfere in Lebanese affairs.

As Ghassan Salame, a former Lebanese cabinet minister, told the New York Times last week, “You need democrats to produce democracy. You can’t produce it through institutions. You need people to fight for it to make it real. Neither American tanks nor domestic institutions can do it.”

“Each country in the Middle East will take a different path of reform and every nation that starts on that journey can know that America will walk at its side,” Bush said today. The trick is doing that in a way that helps without alienating.

grr