Libya unrest: Al Jazeera vs. BBC Arabic vs. CNN

As a student of the Arabic language, I am trying to get as much of my information about the Arab unrest as possible from Arabic language sources in order to improve my language skills, and have been playing Al Jazeera and BBC Arabic as a constant backdrop while I do my daily chores. As such, although my Arabic is far from perfect (I understand the general idea of what’s going on and some details, but not 100 percent of what is said), I would say that the Arabic language media gives viewers an interesting spin on what is going on in the Arab World. Given that most of my knowledge of what is going on comes from Arabic sources (with some supplemental reading from BBC English to fill in some of the details), when I finally watched CNN in English today, I was surprised at how Anderson Cooper and his team reported the events in Libya. (For simplicity’s sake, I will stick to Libya coverage in this post)

The first thing which struck me about CNN’s coverage was its extensive coverage of the possibility of an American no-fly zone, and whether or not America had a right to get involved in yet another Arab country. Cooper invited Fouad Ajami, a Lebanese scholar at Johns Hopkins, and the American president of the American University of Cairo to opine on Libya. He also called in one or two American security hacksters to share their thoughts. Of course, he neglected to ask any Libyans what they thought. By contrast, Al Jazeera devoted only one report out of their thirty minute news broadcast to the Western response. To Al Jazeera, coverage of events on the ground is more important than the pontificating of experts in the studio. What the West thinks is not as important as the fact that this is a “people’s revolution”. CNN’s take seemed to be “What can we do for the Arabs?”; the Arabs are passive, needing Western help. According the neo-cons they invited in, they will be eternally grateful to the United States if it helps out.

Another thing that struck me was that Al Jazeera has journalists on the ground in Eastern Libya, who constantly ask the Libyans for their thoughts (which I had difficulty understanding because of their impossible accents). They give the local Libyans a voice. To the BBC’s credit, they also have “boots on the ground” inquiring after the local situation, but Al Jazeera’s coverage seems rawer and much less slick, which makes it feel more “real” and more “human”. As Al Jazeera likes to boast, it keeps a finger on the pulse of the “Arab Street”. CNN’s coverage, however, gives the impression that the Libyans are an undifferentiated mass of Arabs in a faraway country, speaking a strange language. It does not really give them a voice; perhaps this is due to the language barrier, but I still wonder why they don’t make the effort.

BBC Arabic occupies an interesting middle-ground between the two. The BBC loves to pontificate and opine, and it relies mostly on Arab exiles in London and the United States to do so. Their opinions are an important part of the Arabic Media which Al Jazeera neglects, but they nevertheless suffer from being too far away from the source and tend to simplistically boil every analysis down to “freedom” and “democracy”. They do not seem to stray farther from those analyses. However, the BBC more than makes up for this with its impressive program “Point of Discussion” in which ordinary Arabs call into the studio and air their opinions. The program usually gets several different people to talk about the same subject from slightly different angles, which makes for an interesting listen. Alas, the problem with the “Arab on the Street” is that he (or she) usually speaks Arabic with an accent, making listening tricky for this student of the language. (North Africans are a particular challenge; Levantines less so)

That, in a nutshell, is my impression of the media coverage of the Libya crisis. One really needs to listen to a variety of sources to get a good picture of what is going on. (Of course I am not following my own advice; I don’t really listen to BBC English or Al Jazeera English) However, if I had to only listen to one channel, it would be Al Jazeera; I am impressed by its dispassionate coverage, and it is important to understand what the Arab Street think, from the source. Note, thought, that I am not 100 percent fluent in Arabic, and this may have an impact on my understanding of what is going on.