The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (89 page)

It is difficult for Americans to make knowledgeable judgments about the existence of civilization-related clashes if the public knows little about the civilizations in question. Although the news media should not bear the entire burden of teaching the public about the world—the education system also has major responsibilities, which it consistently fails to fulfill—news coverage is a significant element in shaping the public’s understanding of international events and issues. Aside from their occasional spurts of solid performance, American news organizations do a lousy job of breaking down the public’s intellectual isolation.

The breadth of news coverage depends on news organizations’ own view of the world, a view that is often too narrow. Expanding it will require a surge of ambition and a reversal of the reductions in international coverage. Media analyst Andrew Tyndall reported that in 1989 the ABC, CBS, and NBC principal evening newscasts presented 4,032 minutes of datelined coverage from other countries. That had dropped to as low as 1,382 minutes in 2000. With the attacks on the United States and the war in Afghanistan, the figure rose to 2,103 minutes in 2002, which was still only slightly more than half the total of 1989.
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Because of the US invasion of Iraq, international coverage by American news organizations rose substantially in 2003, at least for Iraq-related stories. According to Tyndall’s ADT Research, the big three US television networks—ABC, CBS, and NBC—devoted 4,047 minutes of their principal weeknight newscasts to Iraq. But beyond Iraq, the networks’ international reporting was negligible. For all of 2003, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict received 284 minutes, Afghanistan 80 minutes, the global AIDS epidemic 39 minutes, and global warming 15 minutes.
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From among these topics, consider what the public is likely to make of the Israeli-Palestinian story when coverage averages less than two minutes per week per network. The issues are complex, and their impact is incendiary in parts of the world. A news organization that provides such scant coverage cannot hope to truly inform its audience, and members of that audience cannot hope to truly understand what is going on.

Also in 2003, the news media virtually ignored humanitarian crises from Chad to Chechnya to Colombia and beyond that were identified by Doctors Without Borders in the organization’s annual list of the ten most under-reported stories.
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When asked if the American public was suffering from compassion fatigue concerning such crises, Doctors Without Borders executive director Nicholas De Torrente said:

If you have very quick, superficial coverage of very difficult, complex issues, then of course people will turn off and blank out and not be interested, and you’ll see an ongoing litany of anarchy, chaos, crisis without rhyme or reason. However, if you do look at issues and devote resources and attention to them and try to understand them, then people will catch on . . . and there is a connection that is established.
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One aspect of the shrinkage of international coverage is the reduction in the number of foreign bureaus maintained by American news organizations, notably the big three television networks. As of mid-2003, ABC, CBS, and NBC each maintained six overseas bureaus with full-time correspondents, but since the peak of international coverage during the 1980s, each has closed bureaus or removed correspondents when there was not a full bureau in place. ABC did this in seven cities, including Moscow, Cairo, and Tokyo. CBS did it in four cities, including Beijing and Bonn. NBC followed suit in seven cities, including Paris and Rome.
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The weakness of international coverage is no secret within the news business. A 2002 study conducted for the Pew International Journalism Program found that among American newspaper editors, “nearly two-thirds of those responsible for assembling their newspaper’s foreign news coverage rate the media’s performance in this area as fair or poor.”
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When asked about their own news organization’s performance in satisfying readers’ interest in international news, 56 percent gave their own paper a rating of fair or poor (and only two percent rated their paper as excellent).
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Editors at newspapers with a circulation of at least 100,000 were particularly critical of television news. Sixty-seven percent of the editors said network television news did a fair or poor job of covering international events, while 40 percent said cable news coverage deserved only a fair or poor rating.
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Overall, the study found, “The ratings given to international news coverage were significantly lower than those awarded to the media’s coverage of sports, national, local, and business news.”
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Such lackluster performance stands in contrast with what the editors perceived as an increase in the public’s interest in international news, which contradicted the conventional wisdom that the American news audience resists learning about the rest of the world. In general, said the editors, only seven percent of their readers were not too interested in international news.
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Ninety-five percent of the editors said reader interest in international news had increased since the 11 September 2001 attacks, but 64 percent said they believed this interest would soon decline to pre-9/11 levels.
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This reflects condescension on the part of journalists toward the public that in itself merits study, particularly in terms of the values governing the relationship between the news media and the people they purportedly serve.

Another survey, conducted for the Project for Excellence in Journalism, found that by spring 2002, network television news had largely reverted to its pre-9/11 lineup of topics. The amount of hard news had dropped from 80 percent of stories in October 2001 to 52 percent in early 2002. Meanwhile, the number of “lifestyle” stories made a comeback. Such stories made up 18 percent of total network news stories in June 2001, only one percent in October 2001, and back to 19 percent during the first 13 weeks of 2002.
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This continued a trend that has been noticeable for more than a decade.

These findings indicate that in this age of globalization, when the news media’s view of the world could and should become ever broader, intellectual isolationism has taken hold, at least in journalism and presumably in other fields as well. When asked what obstacles kept them from increasing international coverage, 53 percent of the editors in the Pew survey cited cost. This was followed by lack of interest by senior editors and lack of experienced reporters, each cited by nine percent of the editors.
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Regardless of the rationale that news executives offer for their limited coverage, news consumers are being denied tools they need to evaluate the state of the world. Shortly after the 2001 attacks on the United States,
Boston Globe
editor Martin Baron said that “most Americans are clueless when it comes to the politics and ideology in [the Muslim] world and, in that sense, I think we do bear some responsibility.”
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Being clueless is not a good starting point when searching for answers to such persistent questions as “Why do they hate us?” and, for that matter, defining who “they” might be.

When Egyptian President Mubarak toured Al-Jazeera’s cramped headquarters in Qatar, he observed, “All this trouble from a matchbox like this.”
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For Mubarak and other Arab leaders who prefer their news media compliant, Al-Jazeera has caused plenty of trouble by fostering debate about topics that many in the region—including many news organizations—treat as being outside the news media’s purview. On Al-Jazeera, everything from the role of women to the competence of governments is addressed, often loudly. The station’s motto is, “The opinion, and the other opinion,” which might seem commonplace in the West, but is exceptional in the Arab media world.

The Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, provided $140 million to create Al-Jazeera, which began broadcasting in 1996. When the Emir touts Qatar as a progressive Islamic state that welcomes Western investment, he can showcase Al-Jazeera as evidence of his commitment to reform. He tolerates the station’s independence, but Al-Jazeera’s bureaus have periodically been shut down by Middle Eastern governments angered by its coverage. The station was seen mainly as a curiosity until 2001, when its content began capturing international attention. Shortly after the attacks on the United States, Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi went on Al-Jazeera to say that he thought the attacks were “horrifying, destructive,” and that the United States had the right to retaliate.
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Al-Jazeera also played a leading role in the coverage of the US war against Afghanistan. It was allowed to remain in Taliban-controlled territory after Western journalists were ordered to leave. It presented live coverage of the aftermath of American air strikes and emphasized civilian casualties and reactions to the war.
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It gained further notoriety by broadcasting videotapes of Osama bin Laden. News organizations that were unable to get closer than the fringes of the war turned to Al-Jazeera for help, and the station’s logo began appearing on newscast footage around the world.

Its constituency was growing. While it covered Afghanistan, Al-Jazeera also kept up its intensive reporting about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with a pro-Palestinian slant (suicide bombings were referred to as “commando operations”) and emphasis on the mood on “the Arab street.” Arabs in the Middle East and scattered around the world increasingly turned to Al-Jazeera.

This audience, eager for news featuring an outlook that they can identify with, is hard to define. Mohammed el-Nawawy and Adel Iskandar, authors of a book about Al-Jazeera, wrote that “the connections that bind the 300 million Arabs in twenty-two countries are often abstract. It’s not a military alliance, a political truce, an economic cooperative, or a simple linguistic tie. It may not even be reduced to a common religion. Instead, what brings Arabs together is a notion of joint destiny.”
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The idea of joint destiny might seem to some skeptics as overrating Arab commonality. Debate about Arab unity—even just unity of aspirations—is similar to that concerning Muslim unity, which is a contentious issue related to the clash theory. Huntington talks about Islam in terms of “consciousness without cohesion,” which he says is “a source of weakness to Islam and a source of threat to other civilizations.”
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News media and other communications tools might foster increased cohesion. Regardless of how the Arab population is characterized, there clearly is an audience for news presented from an Arab perspective, and with that audience, Al-Jazeera has a credibility that eludes Western media.

The Al-Jazeera story is important because clashes between civilizations can occur in ways other than armed conflict. There can be clashes of perspective, the beginnings and outcomes of which are affected by information flows; how people see the world shapes their attitudes toward other cultures. When Al-Jazeera covered the Iraq War in 2003 and beyond, it did so with a spin that its audience had not seen during the Gulf War a decade earlier. Although there was no effort to paint Saddam Hussein as a hero, the coverage certainly did not feature the boosterism that colored much of the American war journalism. Instead, Al-Jazeera presented a distinctively Arab view of the war, with graphic reports about civilian casualties and later about mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners by American and British forces.

And always on Al-Jazeera there was the undercurrent of news about events in Israel, with reporting that was pointedly sympathetic to the Palestinians. Discussion of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in terms of its effect on the overall US-Arab relationship was notably missing from much of the American news coverage and political debate. City University of New York professor Ervand Abrahamian observed that post-9/11 coverage by
The New York Times
, among others, “scrupulously avoided anything connecting the rise of radical political Islam with Israel and Palestine.”
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Policies and events themselves, not simply the reporting of them, influence political attitudes. News coverage in itself will not create or prevent intercultural tensions, but the flow of information has an effect, and that flow and its effect have been enhanced considerably by the Internet. As an interactive medium as well as a conventional information provider, the Internet can bring unprecedented cohesion to the most far-flung community. Scholar Gary R. Bunt has noted that “it is through a digital interface that an increasing number of people will view their religion and their place in the Muslim worlds, affiliated to wider communities in which ‘the West’ becomes, at least in Cyberspace, increasingly redundant.”
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As the Internet continues to reduce the significance of national borders and other boundaries, the entire array of global media and information technology may help create virtual communities that are as worthy of coverage as traditional states have been.

During the past few years, Internet usage has increased dramatically in some Islamic countries, but as of early 2004 it still lagged far behind the levels of access in much of the rest of the world. No predominantly Islamic country ranks in the top 25 nations in terms of percentage of population with access to the Internet, in the entire Middle East, minus Israel, only five percent of the population has Internet access. In large, predominantly Muslim countries elsewhere, the rate was even lower—for example, 3.6 percent in Indonesia and one percent in Pakistan. Statistics about the growth of Internet use are more substantial: from 2000 to 2004, use in Iran increased almost 1,200 percent and in Saudi Arabia 610 percent. But the figures from Pakistan illustrate how far Internet use still needs to grow. Although usage in that country increased more than 1,000 percent during the four years, in real numbers the expansion was from 133,900 to 1.5 million users, out of a total population of more than 157 million.
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