Tag: media

Reducing margins of victory by two or three percent, this is how Arab elections and referendums are developing. Do Arab leaders think that they can trick their people with small reductions in their margins of victory in elections, by reducing their official vote rigging from 99.99 percent to 97 or 95 percent? When will they stop this farce and this cheap theater? Do any of these leaders wonder why the Arab world is crying out about the leaders’ double-talk about elections, saying one thing here, and another elsewhere? Has anything changed after hundreds of referendums and elections have been fabricated in the cellars of Arab intelligence agencies? When will the people tell these regimes that have no shame that enough is enough? The young and the old in Ukraine turned out to protest elections in which incidents of fraud did not exceed one percent. Meanwhile Arab votes are robbed year after year and no one has the courage to so much as speak up about these violations. When will [Arab leaders] realize that if they had true elections they would get negative 99.99 percent of the vote?

To what extent are [Arab leaders] wasting millions of dollars on election charades (…)? Is it not better to use those millions to fix some of the Arab hospitals that are not suitable for wild animals, much less domesticated animals? Is it not preferable that, instead of using millions of meters of cloth [as signs] for empty election slogans, we give that cloth to the poor and the destitute to cover their naked bodies?

Does one of the [the Arab leaders] wonder if we are in need of elections and referendums after all of that? However, from the other side, why do we not consider the reductions in the margins of victory to just 95% of the popular vote a positive step that indicates that Arab leaders have begun to feel a little bit of shame? Why do we not say that the Arab elections, in spite of their weaknesses, are a necessary exercise needed to achieve a true democracy? Should we not encourage the changes that have begun to occur with respect to Arab elections instead of denouncing them? Should we not work on the principle that just because one can’t have everything, doesn’t mean you can ignore the matter in its entirety? And is it not unfair to lump all Arab elections in one basket? Did the Algerian president not win by just 85 percent of the vote? Didn’t the Mauritanian president win one time by 60 percent? And didn’t the Tunisian president allow the opposition to participate in the elections?

Hopefully this helps illustrate why Al Jazeera is a welcome addition to the Arab and global media.

CAIRO (AFP) – Key players in the search for Middle East peace have reached understanding on a plan that could lead to a comprehensive settlement.

“An important understanding, that could constitute an agreement in principle, has been reached by Egypt, Israel, the Palestinians and the significant international parties — the United States and the European Union — on a comprehensive solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” the official news agency MENA quoted senior Egyptian sources as saying Tuesday.

As we can plainly see, it contains actually nothing. Not only are there no on-the-record sources, but basically it talks about an “understanding.” Pretty vague. Subsequent stories based on the MENA report (do a Google News search on Egypt and you’ll see at least twenty of them) all started with an optimistic tone about the impending breakthrough and then actually saw that no one else knew about this. Still, they kept pretending that something had actually happened. It finally took someone getting an Israeli official saying that there was nothing happening for people to die. In other words, MENA managed to manufacture a story when there was actually nothing there and got the world’s major news outlets to play along with it. And no one along the way thought it might be a little strange that an “understanding” had been agreed to so soon after Arafat’s death and while Sharon is facing a political crisis.

Reading this tribute makes his loss to the current hysteria all the more regrettable. Hitchens’s desire to imitate his idol, George Orwell, took him to the point of fabricating his own Spanish civil war and his own fascism when there is but a relatively powerless, if occasionally deadly, threat in what he likes to call “Islamo-fascism.”

Most Malaysian analysts interviewed for this article said they eagerly await a greater al-Jazeera presence in the region, regardless of what shape it takes, because it will provide viewers with a different perspective. But when it comes to news, celebrating diversity for its own sake can be dangerous. Consider how big media have tended to celebrate diversity in the divisive post-September 11, 2001, era. Outfits such as al-Jazeera, CNN and FOX are ossifying allegiances and exacerbating gaps in understanding as they inexorably pursue their nationalistic agendas.

On the other hand, al-Jazeera is a young station. It is bold and irreverent. It has challenged traditional barriers of press freedom in the Middle East and has forced outlets subservient to draconian Arab governments to either change or risk being ignored. Who’s to say al-Jazeera can’t become the same inspiring equipoise in Asia? In places like Malaysia, which consistently lands in the basement of press freedom indices, and where the variety of print and broadcast media eerily mirrors the choices on an old Soviet-era supermarket shelf, a stronger challenge to the status quo is sorely needed. (Despite plans to drop its incendiary tone, Collins said the Malaysian government has no intentions of tampering with al-Jazeera’s content.)

This reflects an interesting trend for the Gulf to look Eastward to India and South-East Asia rather than to the Arab world and the West. The Asia Times article quoted above is rather snarky about Al Jazeera in my opinion, sometimes unfairly. But it raises some interesting questions as to whether it will provide the same critical take on South-East Asia that it has on the Arab world. Their coverage of China, in an area where big media’s desire to get inside the homes of 1.2 billion Chinese has made them rather coy about criticizing Beijing (see Murdoch’s pandering for instance), will be particularly interesting to watch.

Update: As I thought, this is backfiring on MEMRI: look at all the attention that it’s getting, as well as the calls for investigations into exactly how MEMRI operates in these posts [1, 2] on juancole.com. Of particular interest would be investigating MEMRI’s Jerusalem offices, for which Cole prints the address. Jerusalamite bloggers might want to look into it.