World and America watching different wars: CNN vs. Al Jazeera: Seeing is often believing

By Danna Harman | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

CAIRO, EGYPT [^]The Hamouda family is gathered around the TV, sipping sugary tea and glued to the pictures of captured US soldiers being interrogated by Iraqis on the popular Qatar-based satellite station Al Jazeera.

"What's your name?" A terrified young female POW is asked. "How old are you?" The camera moves to her feet, which are bloody and bare.

"Yieee!," cheers eldest son Ahmed, knocking over a fake geranium plant as he shoots up from the couch in excitement. "Show it how it is!"

It is not that they are happy to see suffering, says Hellmy, the father, somewhat apologetically, as the camera weaves between several bodies. "But the other side of the story needs to be told."

The gruesome video shown Sunday on Al Jazeera - reaching 35 million Arab-speakers worldwide, including about 20 percent of the Egyptian population - will probably never be seen by the average American TV viewer.

In fact, American audiences are seeing and reading about a different war than the rest of the world. The news coverage in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, reflects and defines the widening perception gap about the motives for this war. Surveys show that an increasing number of Americans believe this is a just war, while most of the world's Arabs and Muslims see it as a war of aggression. Media coverage does not necessarily create these leanings, say analysts, but it works to cement them.

"The difference in coverage between the US and the rest of the world helped contribute to the situation that we're in now,'' says Kim Spencer, president of WorldLink TV, a US satellite channel devoted to airing foreign news. "Americans have been unable to see how they're perceived."

That would be the rub of it, wouldn't it? I hear this jarring bell in my head, like I've heard a version of this story before. And I have. It was in the protestations in the former Soviet Union, protestations perhaps also by ordinary Russians who sometimes met American tourists, who may have claimed that they "did so" have a free press.

As in, the US is the frog in the boiling water. What we see and hear is so tightly controlled by this time that people are turning to the Internet and the foreign press to find out if something different might be going on than what they are told, perhaps the way folks in Hungary turned to Radio Free Europe.

For example, most Americans, watching CNN, Fox, or the US television networks, are not seeing as much coverage of injured Iraqi citizens, or being given more than a glimpse of the antiwar protests now raging in the Muslim world and beyond.

In the Middle East, Europe, and parts of Asia, by comparison, the rapid progress made by US led troops has been played down. And many aspects of the conflict being highlighted in the US - such as the large number of Iraqi troops surrendering, the cooperation between US-led forces and various Gulf states, commentary on America's superior weapons technology, and the human interest angles on soldier life in the desert - are almost totally absent from coverage outside the US.

"Sure, the news we get in the Arab world is slanted," admits Hussein Amin, chair of the department of journalism and mass communication at Cairo's American University. "In the same way the news received in the US is biased."

The view from Europe

Some analysts note that European press ownership is less concentrated than its counterparts in the US, and is seen as providing more perspectives than either the Arab or American outlets. In Frankfurt, for example, readers have access to 16 different German language newspapers - many of which present different vantage points, which makes for a more lively and varied debate.

European journalists also seem to ask different, more skeptical, questions of this war, often being the ones at White House and Pentagon press conferences to ask whether the invasion of Iraq has turned up any of the weapons of mass destruction that used to justify the invasion - even as their American counterparts repeatedly focus on such questions as whether Saddam Hussein is alive or dead.

Media watchers say the European press has tended to be more balanced than the US media in dealing with the war, in part because Europe is so much closer to the Muslim world. John Schmidt, a former reporter for the International Herald Tribune, who has just returned from Europe, notes that in Marseille, France, 30 percent of the population is Muslim. In Berlin, the biggest minority population is the Turks.

The truth is, American journalists don't know how much they embarrass themselves when out in the rest of the world.

An exchange from CNN two nights ago is instructive. Aaron Brown in the middle of the night was talking to a NYTimes reporter at CentCom (CNN & NYTimes have a mutual agreement going on this war, with all their embeds, etc). The NYTimes woman at CentCom (seems like her name was... Jane Somebody?) was talking about the frustrations of working at CentCom, where information was so highly managed. Besides Aaron's somewhat surprise (he didn't say "It is?" but he did act a bit like, "Oh, they wouldn't lie to us there, would they?"), he also asked her what others in the press were saying. She gave him a frank appraisal of what a Lebanon journalist and friend of hers said in flipping around on all the sources they had--and it was clear her friend thought American coverage revealed itself as a propaganda wing for the US government, and at the very least, anything covered by the embeds was compromised.

Aaron was like, "Oh, I get it," but at the same time, he sort of protested, like "what else can we do?"

I'll give Aaron credit. He did cotton on to what the assumption about CNN was, but the pity is that he didn't operate with that basic knowledge set and guard against that judgment by the journalistic peers in the first place and work harder from the beginning to counter it.

"There are really two stories unfolding here, one is the war and its progress and the second one is the progress of world opinion," says Tom Patterson, a media expert at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. "That second dimension is there in the American press, but it's clearly way underreported."

For instance, American media outlets may report on the demonstrations in other countries, particularly if there are violent clashes. But they don't devote as many resources to covering in depth the growing anti-American sentiment - even among American allies - or its implications for the future, says Professor Patterson.

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Interest in the war has been so high that Indonesia's TV7 began pirating Al Jazeera's signal shortly before the start of the war. The new station carries the Arab-language broadcast with simultaneous Indonesian translation. Though Al Jazeera is only shown from 10 in the evening until 11 in the morning an official at TV7 says the news department is receiving about 100 calls a day from viewers, up from "almost zero" before the US invasion began.

The news broadcasts in Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim nation, have been tamer than the news in the Middle East, focusing on protests against the war at home, with official statements against the war from abroad.

But they have also carried some stories sympathetic to US soldiers, including an interview with Anecita Hudson of Alamogordo, Texas. Mrs. Hudson says her son, 23-year-old Army Specialist Joseph Hudson, was one of the prisoners of war shown on Al Jazeera. She said seeing her son captured was "like a bad dream."

Mrs. Hudson didn't see her son on American news outlets. She spotted him on a Filipino cable channel she subscribes to. She is originally from the Philippines.

If the 1991 Gulf War MADE CNN's name in the world (with the radical presumption, still present from Ted Turner's influence, that journalists would cover news as if they didn't have nationality, even with fighting pool restrictions and bullshit--CNN took a lot of heat back then for showing Baghdad's POV, even in a limited way. A lot of scholarship and analysis has been written about that seminal time).

Will this Iraq war put Al Jazeera on the map in the same way? It surely isn't putting Fox News on the map. What is the compelling "MUST SEE" about Al Jazeera that makes President Bush watch it even as he eschews watching all other news coverage while out at Camp David? Could the first President Bush have done that in the Gulf War? I remember the stories from back in the Gulf War, of Pentagon Briefings and other pressers, where the people being briefed said, "Hey, I saw it on CNN just like you did. I don't have any other information beyond that."

Now they would have to say that about Al Jazeera, wouldn't they?

"War is ugly by nature and we did not create these pictures - we are only there to reflect reality on the ground,"' says Jihad Ali Ballout, Al Jazeera's media relations head. "Truth is sometimes unpleasant and gruesome, and I feel distressed when people ask me to dress it up."

Washington watches Al Jazeera

The Bush administration sees Al Jazeera - the cable news channel made famous for its airing of Osama Bin Laden tapes - as having an anti-American bias. But, since the seven-year-old Al Jazeera has grown from six to 24 hours of daily programming and reaches more than 35 million Arab speakers around the world, including 150,000 in the United States, Washington seems to be attempting to work more closely with the network.

The Pentagon offered Al Jazeera four choice spots for its reporters to be embedded with US military units and assigned it a special media liaison officer and both National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld have given extensive interviews to Al Jazeera in recent days. Al-Arabiya and Abu Dhabi, two other 24-hour Arab-language stations, have received similar attention from the administration.

Al Jazeera says that it has two of its correspondents "embedded" with US units - but the units in question are in Kuwait. It has no reporters with US troops directly participating in the invasion. 2:08:54 AM