With al-Jazeera and Iran launching English-language news channels, never has covering the Middle East been more politicised...The British producer we had just met, sitting under a BBC sun-tent in Naqqoura, the southernmost town in Lebanon, could hardly believe his ears. After BBC requests for on-camera interviews with Hezbollah representatives had been consistently rejected by the party’s leadership throughout the duration of the five-week war, he was astounded to hear that our two-person team – a local cameraman and me – had roamed freely around southern Lebanon’s Hezbollah-dominated villages for several days, interviewing on camera many of the movement’s members and supporters. Undoubtedly, the fact that my cameraman Ziad Tarraf was a southern Lebanese Shiite who usually worked for al-Jazeera and had solid contacts inside Hezbollah helped. So did my fluent Arabic, which smoothed along what would have otherwise been awkward introductory exchanges with the Hezbollah officials we met in each village. As always in the Middle East, working for Greek television was a magic passport, opening doors that would have remained closed to the Anglo-Saxon media organisations perceived by many Lebanese as promoters of unbalanced, pro-Israeli news coverage.
Many British TV channels left a sour impression in Lebanon in their wake this summer. One Lebanese man who was employed by the BBC as a fixer was shocked at the manner in which the Corporation’s correspondents would insist upon several repeat takes of interviews because the shell-shocked interview subjects – often recently-bereaved refugees – would provide overlong answers, address the camera rather than the correspondent, or grasp for the mike. A local fixer for Sky News – a secular Shiite journalist with family in the south – was disturbed at how her British employers never once asked her whether her family was safe. “One reporter insisted on drawing attention to the numerous portraits of Iranian Shiite clerics hung up throughout the South as evidence of an Iranian presence,” the BBC fixer added. “He couldn’t understand that they are an expression of faith, rather than evidence of a political presence.”
In the devastated village of Aita al-Shaab on the Lebanese-Israeli border, an elderly resident named Muhammad Dakdouk, a member of Hezbollah’s re-supply unit, freely offered to share his story when he came upon us filming the shattered streets two weeks after the end of the fighting. “The sons of the Party [Hezbollah] are our children,” Dakdouk declaimed. “We are the Party, not someone foreign coming from outside, like Iran or Syria, as the Israelis charge.” The father of an absent Hezbollah fighter, Dakdouk pointed to where his son had killed three Israeli soldiers and showed us a grisly collection of Israeli medical supplies – blood pouches and bloodied uniforms that the Israeli Defence Forces left behind after occupying his house.
Back in Beirut, access to Hezbollah was harder. We wanted to shoot a segment about al-Manar, the controversial Hezbollah TV channel that remained on air throughout the conflict despite repeated Israeli bombardments of its offices and transmitters. Its access to Hezbollah field commanders allowed it accurately to announce Israeli casualties ahead of the IDF and led to some Arabic-speaking Israelis switching to it as the conflict progressed. In the Arab world, al-Manar’s unapologetically anti-Israeli coverage made its popularity soar, much like al-Jazeera when it exploded upon a State censorship-suffocated region in the mid-1990s. After vetting us repeatedly, Hezbollah sent us out with a carefully picked al-Manar correspondent, who had remained inside Beirut’s southern Shiite suburbs throughout the bombardment to report on the catastrophe.
Despite Hezbollah’s wariness, a week after a major security lapse, when an Israeli photographer snapped his way through a bombarded area that had served as the epicentre of the Shiite movement’s bureaucracy, we were hardly challenged. The ability to move unfettered through a still-smoking war-zone and conduct on-the-spot interviews with anyone we chose struck me as an extraordinary departure in an area notorious for the draconian limitations imposed upon local and foreign journalists. In Baghdad, Ministry of Information officials had shepherded sceptical foreign journalists around an ever-shrinking Iraqi-controlled area as proof that they were winning, even as U.S. troops moved into the Iraqi capital. Aside from being the first Arab force successfully to face down the Israeli army, Hezbollah also proved this summer to have one of the more enlightened media policies in the region. Its leaders are learning that offering more access is better for their cause.
Western coverage of the Middle East has undergone sensational changes in the past two decades. The advent of 24-hour satellite news channels threw open the gates of free speech in what has always been a notoriously circumspect region. At the same time, a new generation of English-speaking Arab students graduated from U.S. and British universities and flooded the journalism market. The cliché of the foreign correspondent in the white linen suit idling his time away on his expenses in a Middle East bar while local stringers do most of the work died with the end of the Lebanese civil war. Today, Arab bylines are far more common in American and British newspapers, while British Middle-East hybrids such as Rageh Omar have penetrated a previously white-dominated television sphere.
Although today’s Baghdad is one glaring exception to the rule, it is the danger of making reporting sorties into the dangerous streets of striferidden Iraq, rather than an outdated mentality, that forces foreign correspondents to fall back on their local fixers to get the story. Random shootings, car bombings, kidnappings, and the advice of security professionals all act as a strong disincentive for journalists to venture beyond the reinforced compounds they inhabit. Increasingly over the past few years, foreign journalists have been seeing Iraq exclusively through the prism of the U.S. military, as they embed with units engaged inside Baghdad and in several hotspots around the country. For many media professionals – especially those who come from the U.S. – embedding provides the first and often only glimpse they have of the Middle East.
Having lived in the region on and off for the past decade, the embedding experience of others provided me with the most bizarrely distorted perspective of the Arab world I’ve had till now. Sheltered behind thick armour and surrounded by 20-something-year-old U.S. soldiers with zero understanding of the culture outside their barricaded base, my time in Baqouba – a particularly violent, mixed Sunni-Shiite town in eastern Iraq where moving around among the local populace is too dangerous – proved a depressing indoctrination into why cultural insensitivities doomed the U.S. occupation from the very start.
Unable to do much reporting inside Baqouba, I spent time speaking to the journalists riding the embed train. Most were American, with a smattering of British and Australians thrown in. Many of the Americans had been motivated to come to Iraq for the same reasons as the soldiers signing up to the military – no prospects, a dead-end job or a mid-life crisis back home. The Americans produced mostly myopic human interest stories about the troops, with scant reference to the country they were occupying. One Fox News crew returning to Baghdad’s Green Zone – the City’s “Little America” – after an embed entered the press centre whooping that the U.S. military had provided them with their own Humvee to drive around the base. The Brits opted for dangerous front-line postings from which they could take the pulse of the occupation and assess the morale of the troops. Very few had any experience of the Middle East, unlike those correspondents working for the wire agencies in Baghdad.
Iraq may be just the most extreme example of a hostile environment for foreign journalists to operate in, but the region offers up several examples of inhospitable conditions. In Damascus, a regime lackey in pointed leather shoes and a cheap suit that ill-disguises his sagging girth sits behind a desk in the Orwellian Ministry of Information building. He snaps out orders in badtempered Arabic to inferiors before turning to inform visiting correspondents that Syria is changing and all foreign journalists are now welcome. In Sudan, the government has banned all Western media from entering the country and recently arrested one journalist on charges of spying. And in Israel, the Israeli army has shot – often fatally – enough Arab and foreign journalists to scare the rest off and render coverage of the West Bank and Gaza almost impossible.
In Tehran, where I live, the new Ahmadinejad government has frozen all residencies for Western journalists. The Islamic Republic of Iran is notorious for being one of the most inaccessible places on earth for foreign press – right up there with North Korea and Saddam-era Iraq. Israelis are officially banned from entering, Americans are rarely granted visas and, for Europeans, access to the country is restricted in direct proportion to the escalating nuclear crisis. The bureau chief of a Western news agency surveyed the bleak scene and assessed the score: two employees for news agencies still waiting for visas six months after they were assigned to Iran; a French journalist whose visa has just been revoked; and a continuing crackdown on local journalists. Not to mention the half-dozen Iranian newspapers shuttered over the past year.
As the nuclear controversy has developed between Iran and the West, the authorities have become ever more obstructive and unco-operative. Very few foreign journalists are based in Tehran and those who are here are forced to jump over bureaucratic and security hurdles to get their job done. All filming requests or permission for interviews with Iranian officials must be officially granted through the Ministry of Islamic Guidance, an administrative behemoth that theoretically regulates all cultural activity in the country. Weeks can pass before the OK is given, rendering all news coverage impossible. One sympathetic Ershad official advised me to cultivate the “patience of Ayyoub” – a Persian expression referring to a notoriously longsuffering Muslim religious figure – in dealings with them. All military exercises are out-of-bounds for foreign journalists, who are suspected of being spies, and the Iranian authorities prefer to invite Government-owned news services and television stations before distributing pre-selected highlights to the foreign media.
But even when permission is granted, it usually marks just the beginning of difficulties. Frances Harrison, BBC correspondent in Tehran, experienced the inconveniences when she was recently granted “unprecedented access” to cover a public speech by hard-line Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, under whose watch mass personnel changes have swept through Iran’s ministries. “We were bundled on to non-air-conditioned buses stuffed with plain-clothes intelligence men and driven off beyond the south of Tehran,” she wrote for a From Our Own Correspondent dispatch. “As we were led into a sports stadium, security officials spoke into their walkie-talkies saying: ‘We’re bringing the foreigners in now.’ Bearded men we did not know kept walking past muttering about the BBC. A security woman in a chador called Mrs Rezaie was assigned to keep watch over me. At first she told members of the public not to speak to me; later on she disappeared, having found it impossible to control the crowd.”
Harrison’s travails continued as plain-clothes agents offered interviews which rapidly turned into diatribes against the West, while authentic interviews were sabotaged by cheerleaders leading the crowd into “spontaneous” chants of “Death to America”. After the speech, the BBC was called by Ahmadinejad’s office and banned from broadcasting any of the interviews conducted with people in the crowd. When Harrison retorted she would have to announce that they had been censored, she was threatened with the discontinuation of all co-operation, a point that was reinforced by a call from the Islamic Guidance ministry.
The BBC is not the flavour of the day with the Islamic Republic, but nor is al-Jazeera. Its bureau was shut down last year after some programming appeared to encourage separatist violence by ethnic Arabs in southern Iran. It has since been reopened and an allocation made for al-Jazeera’s new, English-language channel. The launch of al-Jazeera International marks the first truly global English-language satellite channel offered by the Arab world. Despite a mostly Anglo-Saxon workforce offering its expertise, the channel’s patron, the Emir of Qatar, is planning to use it as an incubator for fully fluent English-language Arab journalists who can observe and report on the region for English-speaking audiences throughout the world. It all points to the greater battle for the hearts and minds of the Middle East’s local and diasporic populations.
America maintains a 24-hour, Arabic-language news channel al-Hurra (the Free One) as well as a pop radio station with news inserts. Earlier this year, it was decided that an extra $75million would be apportioned for “democracy promoting” activities. These include extending the Voice of America Farsi-language service to a 24-hour format. Iran is hitting back with its own, yet-to-be-launched English-speaking satellite channel. Its staff has been undergoing training in Tehran. Already on air is al-Aalam, an Arabiclanguage, 24-hour news channel, said to be popular with Arab Shiites in Iraq, Lebanon and Persian Gulf states such as Kuwait, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia.
Ultimately, the winners will be news consumers throughout the Middle East who are being increasingly spoiled for choice between competing news-channels, each with their own distinctive slant. This summer’s media crossfire over the war in Lebanon was a good example. Each channel’s coverage was indicative of its patrons’ sympathies. Switching from CNN – dividing its reporting “fairly” between Haifa and Beirut, even as the destruction meted out to both became glaringly disproportional – to pro- Hezbollah al-Jazeera and Saudi-owned al-Arabiyya, was a study in competing world views. On al-Jazeera, Beirut correspondent and Hezbollah cheerleader Ghassan Bin Jeddu maintained a ceaseless stream-of-consciousness commentary on the latest bombardments, tossing all pretensions of objectivity to the wind. His efforts were rewarded when Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah chose al-Jazeera as his media lectern and Bin Jeddu as his favoured scribe. Al-Arabiyya tried hard to maintain the anti- Hezbollah stance espoused by the Saudi leadership, but its coverage leaned ever more towards the militant Shiite organisation as Israeli atrocities mounted. As a news consumer, I found myself always coming back to the BBC’s riveting, mostly balanced coverage.
Ultimately, the kind of access Arab journalists can have in their own region will never be matched by foreigners. But a fresh, outsider’s perspective and a keen eye for detail can still go a long way.
Iason Athanasiadis is a writer, photographer and television producer who has
contributed to a range of media, including the BBC, al-Jazeera, Channel 4, The
Sunday Telegraph and the Christian Science Monitor.