People Like Us: Misrepresenting The Middle East

by Joris Luyendijk

  Aid workers told me that Palestinian parents are so desperate to reassure their children that they say, tomorrow. Or, in an hour. But the bombing continues, and the children lose their trust in their parents, their last place of refuge.

  This is what I miss most in the media: Images of small children crawling into a hole, hysterically hitting and kicking their parents because they are so confused; stories of adolescent girls who mutilate themselves because this is a kind of pain they are in control of themselves; that during the bombing, verses from the Koran are played through the mosque’s loud speakers to help people through their mortal terror. I never see this, and not on Al-Jazeera either. They stick to the Arab taboo against showing vulnerability and sorrow, and accompany their gruesome images of the dead and wounded with texts about the “heroic perseverance of the Iraqi people.” The Gaza bombardment taught me this at least—the term “clean war” belongs with notions like pregnant virgins and democratic dictators.19

  I heard later that this happens quite often to correspondents: A turbulent period brings up memories of other similarly intense periods, and you suddenly need to give way to the feelings you’d repressed at the time. There was no other article in my career that got so many reactions—an illustration that you can often only place your best work outside the stock journalistic genres.

  That would be the sort of material that could bring out the reality of war. Have a veteran sniper describe what it’s like to pick out Iraqis as if they were ducks: American weapons have such a long range that the Iraqis would never realize that anyone was around, until the bullet hit. Or let an Israeli explain street fighting. You’re walking down an alleyway, and suddenly a door opens. You shoot before looking, because if you do it the other way round, and it’s a guy with a gun, you’re a goner. Only it’s a surprised-looking eight-year-old girl in her nightdress who crumples to the floor.

  That’s war, but the reporting on CNN more often resembled the advertisements that armies use to recruit soldiers: “The marines enlarge your world.” “Above all—the air force.” Arabic stations did show unimaginably atrocious images of distraught grandmothers and blown-up children’s heads, hour after hour, though in a way that was more likely to arouse anger and defiance in the viewer than sadness and compassion. Another image I couldn’t get out of my head was of some Iraqi soldiers shot dead in a foxhole, the white flag still grasped in their hands.

  At such moments, the gulf between East and West seemed to widen, not because we are different from each other, but because we are shown radically different images of the world. Day after day, Arabs watched distraught Iraqis whose families had just been blown to bits, limbs all over the place, everything lost. And then they heard the American president triumphantly bragging about the victory with one eye on the next election, and dismissing a question about “collateral damage” as incidental casualties.

  If the Western mass media had done their job during the war, viewers would have sat in front of their television sets crying and vomiting. Did this not happen because hardly anyone with war experience ever works on the editorial teams? Was it because some editors found the military toys with cool names like Apache, Tomahawk, and Daisy Cutter exciting? I worry it was something much worse. Before the war was over, the International Herald Tribune revealed the advice that the major American broadcasters had received from their communications consultancies. These marketing experts help the stations find out what their public like to watch. American broadcasters are commercial outfits, after all. The recommendations were clear: The more nationalistic the reporting, the higher the viewing figures would be. There should be no anti-war demonstrations, no pitiful stories about the victims, and a lot of anthem-playing, fatherland imagery, and fluttering stars and stripes—in the studio, in the logo, in the filler clips. One consultant summed it up in five words: “There’s money in the flag.” And so it turned out. Forty of the fifty most watched programs in America during the war were from Fox News, who described Saddam Hussein as “the big, bad boy from Baghdad,” who adopted the full terminology, approach, and subject matter fed to them by CentCom in Qatar, and who described the anti-war protests in Europe as “organized by communists.”

  That was one more essential filter in the news: The customers. In Europe, too, the ratings showed that people would rather be told things by their familiar anchorman than by a boring-looking expert. They’d rather watch short films on Us against Them than complex analyzes on conflicting interests, let alone historical background pieces that made their own country look bad. In Europe, as in America, the editors-in-chief were primarily judged on their circulation and viewing figures.

  It made you sadder, if not wiser, and the months and years that followed the invasion gave no reason for optimism. American soldiers in Iraq were not welcomed with rice and flowers, but with bombs and grenades. Although there was never proof of an Iraqi collaboration with Al-Qaida, five years after 9/11 almost the half of the American public still believed that Saddam Hussein had been responsible for the attacks and that most of the hijackers had been Iraqis. The idea that the Iraqis would welcome American troops turned out to have been introduced by the Iraqi opposition in exile, who had used the communications consultancy The Rendon Group—the same company that had provided the flags after the American liberation of Kuwait. And the scene on Paradise Square where Iraqis had toppled the giant statue of Saddam Hussein to loud jubilation—“Baghdad celebrates liberation?” It turned out not to have been a massive national festival after all, but something put together by perhaps two hundred Iraqis and a sharp American army officer. Back to you, Jim.

  Afterword

  Events in this book cover the period between 1998 and 2003, and some things have changed a lot since then. The Muslim Brotherhood now blogs. A number of Arab-language TV news stations have begun operating. Footage of Egyptian police brutality appears on YouTube. Young people use their telephones to secretly film sexual harrassment on the street and put it on Facebook. Ariel Sharon and Yasser Arafat have left the stage, a new American administration is in, wars were fought in Gaza and South Lebanon. In Egypt an apparently truly independent newspaper, Almasri Alyowm (The Egyptian Today) seems set to wipe out the state-run competition, fundamentally altering at least the print media landscape in that country.

  At the same time, a lot has remained essentially the same since 2003. Mainstream news coverage of the Middle East is still structured the way it was a few years ago, and there still has been no fundamental debate about the pros and cons of Western support for Arab dictators, and how such decades-long support is to be reconciled with the professed ideals of “freedom-loving” Western governments. Little effort has been made to explain the motives, dilemmas, and self-image of groups such as Al-Qaida, making it harder to defeat them. And the NATO and Israeli PR machines still go largely uncovered, and continue to have the upper hand in imposing their vocabulary and frames of reference. I am not aware of a single mainstream medium anywhere in the world that explains its choice of topics, angles, terminology, and its criteria for hearing some parties to a conflict, but not others.

  When this book appeared in the Netherlands in the summer of 2006, I decided not to include an afterword with suggestions for change. It seemed to me that the problems are so big and diverse that they require a fundamental rethink of the news industry’s basic assumptions. Since there were no obvious instant solutions, I hoped there would be a debate about the problems themselves.

  This was a mistake, as I should have known from the book itself. If you don’t frame a message yourself, others will do that for you—and you may not recognize what you see. In this case, the book was said by reviewers, colleagues, and columnists to claim that “journalism is useless.” Some of my Dutch colleagues even put together a whole book in order to refute this claim and demonstrate how useful they are. It was delightfully absurd: You write a book with the message that every message gets distorted when covered in the media, and what happens? This message gets distorted, too.<
br />
  Perhaps colleagues were not stupid, but jealous, because in the Netherlands alone this book has now sold an incomprehensible quarter of a million copies. It is also out now in Hungary, Italy, Denmark, and Germany, and in some of these countries I’ve had funny encounters and confrontations with colleagues, too. They would say, okay, tell me in one sentence what your book’s about, and I would answer: The book is about the impossibility of saying in one sentence what a situation is about. Colleagues would laugh more or less obligingly, and then press again: Look, we only have twelve seconds for this quote.

  In retrospect, I wish I had had at my disposal at the time the one-sentence framework which I came up with only recently: This book is about factors that lie beyond the control of journalists, but that influence what those journalists cover, and how. The way forward, then, would be to no longer ignore, hide, or obscure those factors, but somehow to integrate them in one’s coverage, thereby helping unsuspecting viewers and readers to better understand what they see and read.

  How? There seem at least five main problems with coverage as it is right now. First, the news media need to find ways to alert their audiences that this is what they are following: The news. Until 9/11 no one in the West, except for Western Muslims and a small circle of professional experts, knew much about Islam. Then Al-Qaida made Islam news—as we know, news is about problems and conflicts—and, as a result, Western audiences have been fed hundreds and hundreds of stories that put Islam and violence together in one frame. Small wonder, then, that many have come to the conclusion that Islam is inherently violent. It is not the journalists’ fault that they highlight mostly problems and conflicts, because these are what news is usually about. But it is the responsibility of journalists to make sure that their audiences realize that what they see is the exception, and not the rule.

  The same goes for so-called “background” information. The problem these days with the media is not that it is impossible to find good background stuff; witness publications such as the Economist, the BBC, and NPR documentaries, and longer pieces in the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books. The problem is that hardly anyone reads these things, and that without this so-called background stuff, news in the foreground is incomprehensible. As a German reviewer pointed out, there is among journalists this cop-out mechanism that as long as readers and viewers can find the good stuff somewhere in the media landscape, it doesn’t really matter that the rest of it is full of below-par material.

  A second avenue for change concerns coverage of non-democratic societies. A place like Syria is not a country with an army; it is an army with a country. This is obscured from view by the regime’s use of labels that are familiar to us: President, parliament, police, party ... But an altogether different system hides behind this facade. That is why journalism in a police state is impossible or, rather, a contradiction in terms; a dictatorship in which journalism as we know it is possible would cease to be a dictatorship.

  Some colleagues and reviewers have countered that this is a matter of effort: You simply need to work harder and have better contacts. But if you do this, and manage to find an opposition member prepared to be quoted, and verify some facts, such “success” would be the biggest failure of all. By producing a news article that was in no way different from a news item about a democratic country, you would have inadvertently hidden the most important thing of all: That the country you are covering is not a democracy at all, and everything that this entails.

  Once you accept that the classical fit-to-print methods of journalism are suited only to the sort of political system they grew out of—democracies—a space opens up for non-conventional reporting. What that space might look like, I wish I knew.

  Third, we need to incorporate in coverage the fact that while news represents the world, this representation then influences that same world. In particular, something needs to be done about the impunity with which PR firms and communications departments operate. They can do so because mainstream media continue to pretend they are not really there. If a reporter goes into a battle zone embedded with the army, this should not merely be pointed out—it should take center stage. The reporter should preface pretty much everything that he or she says with a sentence that goes something like: “Of course, I have no idea what they are keeping from me and I cannot talk to the other side, but what strikes me so far on this tour with the marines is ...” Naturally, this requires the sort of fundamental rethink of basic assumptions mentioned earlier. Much of the glamour and posturing that war correspondents revel in suddenly become pretty ridiculous when you enlarge the frame and reveal how they really operate.

  This point ties in with another area for improvement: The news media are a countervailing power to politicians and corporations, and when media fail this can have serious consequences. Hence, when the media are caught exaggerating or lying (either by omission or commission), they should be treated by other media in the same way that cheating politicians and corporations are treated. When CNN tells a lie, the impact may be much bigger than when my silly little Dutch government does. Yet in the latter case it is considered news; in the former case, it ends up somewhere on the “media page,” at best.

  Two more suggestions. News media need to level with their audiences about the variousness of possible perspectives about a given subject. Readers and viewers need to be reminded that the only consensus is that there is no consensus. Even about this.

  Websites seem ideally suited to deliver those perspectives. Have a foreign editor use “separation barrier,” or “Apartheid wall” or “fence” or whatever other term is available for that concrete thing on the West Bank. I mean in Judea and Samaria. In the Palestinian territories. In the occupied—oh no, disputed—territories. Or is it “liberated?”

  As I have tried to demonstrate in this book, the issue goes further than vocabulary. It would be marvelous to read more than one interpretation of a news event, especially when that interpretation is tied to an explanation of the underlying worldview. Al-Qaida frames most of its actions in defensive terms. If we want to understand Al-Qaida’s appeal, we need to see how it presents itself—not only how the Western foreign-policy establishment views it.

  Who knows what a wonderful narrative technique such explanations may prove to be. Foreign desks have a great deal of expertise and experience that help them decide why a story is news, or not, what the angle should be, etc. Why not experiment with a column, either in the paper or on the web, in which the foreign editor writes a daily update about the criteria behind that day’s journalistic choices? It could take you through the day’s news, pointing out the grey areas of doubt, the blank areas on the map, the stories they would have liked to do but were prevented from running by factors beyond their control ...

  Finally, there are the simplifications and nationalisms inherent in all market-based news media. Here, I am even more clueless. Somehow in the history of our democracies, it has been decided that news should be treated as a product rather than as a good. A product belongs on the market, where the most popular version prevails. A good belongs in civil society, together with, for example, the protection afforded by the police and the justice afforded by the justice system. (In Europe, health care is also seen as a good.)

  It is very difficult to see how democracies can survive when the information on which voters base their ballot-box decisions reflects not what they need to hear, but what they like to hear. If you give people only the food they say they want, they become obese. If you give them only the information they want, they become ignorant and self-righteous. Yes, the United States elected Barack Obama, but its underlying information infrastructure is as defunct as ever. Unless this changes, sooner or later another ignorant, gung-ho populist will win the elections, plunging the U.S.—and the democratic West with it—into another disastrous military adventure.

  A final paradox: The sort of people for whom I wrote this book and afterword are the least likely to read it. But maybe I’m just a pessim
ist from old Europe. I hope so.

  PS: For reasons that should be clear by now, I have changed many names. As well, some of the articles I have quoted have been edited for brevity.

  Notes

  1 De Volkskrant, 21 November 1998

  2 De Volkskrant, 7 August 1998

  3 De Volkskrant, 14 August 1998

  4 De Volkskrant, 7 December 1998

  5 De Volkskrant, 8 October 1998

  6 De Volkskrant, 6 October 1998

  7 De Volkskrant, 8 February 1999

  8 Al-Gumhuriya, 28 September 1999

  9 NRC Handelsblad, 27 December 2001

  10 NRC Handelsblad, 15 March 2001

  11 NRC Handelsblad, 3 August 2002

  12 NRC Handelsblad, 2 February 2002

  13 NRC Handelsblad, 3 April 2002

  14 NRC Handelsblad, 28 March 2003

  15 NRC Handelsblad, 28 March 2003

  16 NRC Handelsblad, 20 March 2003

  17 NRC Handelsblad, 24 March 2003

  18 NRC Handelsblad, 25 March 2003

  19 NRC Handelsblad, 25 March 2003

  Copyright © 2006 by Joris Luyendijk. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

  English translation copyright © Michele Hutchison 2009.

  First published by Uitgeverij Podium in Holland

  as Het zijn net mensen in 2006.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  eISBN : 978-1-593-76354-1