Reflecting Arab sentiment
Hammer and tongs
ALOKE THAKORE
The Arab press, which functions within largely totalitarian systems of governance with some exceptions, is displaying a curious phenomenon. It is in an activist mode. It would be highly unusual for newspapers to poll the people on what their feelings are about the rulers or laws. But with Lebanon it is different.
A newspaper in the United Arab Emirates, The Emirates Evening Post (transparency demands that I share that I am presently associated with it, though not in an editorial capacity) decided to send its reporters to the malls, shops, and streets and get people to write a message or thought about the war in Lebanon. The next day it decided to drop its local pages and carried nothing but scrawls of these messages with names, nationality, and phone numbers of the people. Within the messages were some that may even be said to be inimical to the tenor of the foreign policy of the country. Some were blatantly anti-American.
The establishment newspaper of Dubai, Emirates Today, took the idea forward in a sustained manner. It decided to put a "Stop the War" petition addressed to Kofi Annan on page one, and asked its readers to email, fax, or post the same to them. A few days later, it too decided to dispense with local news and just ran the petitions with photographs of destruction in Lebanon with the last of those pages carrying the message that if the readers wanted to end the war they should keep sending the petition.
These efforts are an extension of a Lebanese newspaper, The Daily Star, which carries a sample letter on its website that can be downloaded and sent to a government representative in any country by citizens of that country. Dubai Media Incorporated, which is a semi-government company, which runs television channels also organized a telethon for Lebanon that raised over US $ 13 million. The Yemeni press lauded the decision of its president to turn over his re-election campaign contribution of over US$ 1 million to the people of Lebanon and Palestine.
While these efforts are understandable in the context of a pan-Arab identity, the hurt felt by the people, and a sense of powerlessness to be of any material assistance, what is noteworthy is the use of the press as a democratic medium in societies that are not patently democratic. The press has begun a campaign to end hostilities. It is getting the voice of the people on its pages about their feelings about Lebanon. There is scarcely any doubt about who the enemy is, who the villains are, who the aggressors are, who the abettors are, and who the victims and sufferers are. The treatment of Nasrallah, the head of the Hezbollah, in the Arab press should be contrasted with how he is treated in the western press to get a sense of unanimity about Arab views on the conflict. It is the consensus over Lebanon that is on display here. And this when some of these Arab states are in a manner of speaking allied to the power that is seen as the abettor number one, the United States of America.
There is little doubt that even in media systems that are not free because of the nature of the polity in which they function, when an issue has become legitimate it acquires the status of agreed common sense of the public. And this common sense will be in the media whether or not it meets the approval of the ruling powers. More crucially, however, what such support shows is that this is the voice of the Arab world. The voice of the Arab street, that horrible coinage of uncertain origin, does not need to be divined, it is there in the Arab press.
Such coverage should allow us to reconsider how we think the media function within politically closed polities and across polities that have a shared cultural, historical, and religious heritage. The lesson is rather simple. Political boundaries and restrictions seem to lose their meanings when issues of a common brotherhood are at stake. The press coverage that takes the people, their voices and opinions seriously might have as a subtext an incipient Arab nationalism and democracy. Whether it ever converts itself into regime changes in these countries is another matter.
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