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Photo Courtesty
of UCLA Internationl Institute
Omar Al-Issawi (left), co-founder of and a journalist with
Al Jazeera, and Norman J. Pattiz, founder of the U.S. government-backed
Radio Sawa and a UC regent, believe their media provide people
in the Middle East with news from a free press, despite critics
who say they disseminate propaganda.
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al jazeera and radio sawa
Media give Middle Easterners a voice
BY MARINA DUNDJERSKI
UCLA Today Staff
Multiple, competing news outlets in the Middle East are needed
to ensure that people’s voices are heard, said two founders
of broadcast media in the region during a forum Oct. 30 sponsored
by the Ronald W. Burkle Center for International Relations.
Omar Al-Issawi, co-founder, reporter and producer at the Qatar-based
television news network Al Jazeera, and Norman J. Pattiz, founder
of the U.S. government-backed Radio Sawa, said they have a critical
journalistic mission to perform, despite being labeled by many as
propaganda tools.
“We have been accused of being agents of Bin Laden and Saddam
and the CIA and the Israeli Mossad and the Wahabis,” Al-Issawi,
a former journalist for the BBC’s Arabic World Service Radio,
told an audience at Korn Convocation Hall. But their goal ultimately
“should be a message of enlightenment, not hatred,”
he said.
The Middle East is a place journalists are imprisoned, tortured
and killed, said Al-Issawi. “If one of us disappears, it is
usually the work of our government. So nobody is going to try to
find us or help us out,” he said.
Known for such breakthroughs in the Arab world as putting the
name of Israel on its maps and being outspokenly critical of just
about everybody, Al Jazeera is not in this business “to pull
the wool over our people’s eyes as governments have done for
so long, ” Al-Issawi said.
Said Pattiz, founder of Westwood One, the nation’s largest
radio network company: “When the history of media is written,
there will be a large place in it for Al Jazeera because it was
the first Middle Eastern broadcaster that broke the cardinal rule
that one Arab country doesn’t criticize another Arab country.”
Pattiz, a University of California regent, started Radio Sawa
after President Clinton appointed him in 2000 to the Broadcasting
Board of Governors. The board was created in 1998 after the U.S.
Information Agency was dismantled.
In creating the board, Congress wanted to erect “a firewall
between the independence of our journalists and the pressures that
might be put on us by the State Department, the administration,
Congress or whomever,” Pattiz explained. “We are to
be an example of a free press in the American tradition in many
places around the world where there is no such thing.”
“It is not our job to change attitudes; it’s our job
to report the news,” Pattiz said. Doing that as a function
of a free press “makes people feel better about democracy
and freedom.”
While Western and Arabic pop songs fill 75% of Radio Sawa’s
airtime, news comes on for five to 10 minutes twice an hour in countries
such as Egypt, Jordan, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait.
According to a poll taken six months after the station was created,
41% of respondents said they listened to Radio Sawa most for news,
up from 1% 30 days after its launch. Because of its success, the
board plans to set up a new satellite television station in the
Middle East that will be news- and information-driven, Pattiz said.
Said Al-Issawi: “I am not coming to the defense of Radio
Sawa here, but Radio Sawa is important in the sense that it’s
another medium that allows people a voice. People know this is an
American project, but they participate because it gives them a platform
to air their opinions about subjects that are very, very dear to
their hearts, [on which] they’ve never been consulted before.”
The event was moderated by Geoffrey Garrett, director of the Burkle
Center and vice provost of the UCLA International Institute. For
a full transcript of the event, go to: www.international.ucla.edu.
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