The CPD Blog is intended to stimulate dialog among scholars, researchers, practitioners and professionals from around the world in the public diplomacy sphere. The opinions represented here are the authors' own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the USC Center on Public Diplomacy.
You might think Barack Hussein Obama would choose a safer audience than the Arab world for his first TV interview as President. But he chose Dubai-based Al Arabiya, and he chose well.
With all the innumerable problems facing the United States, the most daunting long-term problem is America’s relationship to the world; within that context, our complicated and troubled relations with the Arab, Muslim and Middle Eastern nations are the most urgent to address.
By initial indications, the ten-minute interview was a big success. In the words of the experienced journalist who conducted the interview, Hisham Melham, it impressed the viewers of Al-Arabiya with its tone:
That was really the message: it was in the tone…I think he was trying to undermine those who were trying to demonize the United States and demonize him personally, and I think he succeeded when he spoke in a humane voice telling them “members of my family also belong to the Muslim faith”… and I think he [will] disarm a lot of people… [When] he spoke about the humanity of both sides (Israeli and Palestinian)… the average viewers felt that there was an authenticity in his voice, there was a different tone, there was a yearning for a new page…
Melham also spoke with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, describing “the good vibe” that the interview has already sent throughout the Arab world.
Some might say this was President Barack Obama’s first foray into public diplomacy as president. If so, he certainly was a consumate public diplomat. It’s worth noting that, having decided to reach out to the Arab public, the Obama White House had choices. They could have used a U.S.-government owned broadcaster such as Alhurra, with scant audience and limited credibility, or the freight-laden Al Jazeera, tainted in Western eyes by its popularity as a medium used by al Qaeda. They chose wisely Al Arabiya, whose satellite signal made it available throughout the Arab world. There is no doubt that this effort to reach out to the publics of the Arab-speaking world already appears to have been more successful than any other official act of U.S. public diplomacy in this region in recent memory.
Japan on August 28, 2009 @ 11:09 pm "They could have used a U.S.-government owned broadcaster such as Alhurra, with scant audience and limited credibility, or the freight-laden Al Jazeera, tainted in Western eyes by its popularity as a medium used by al Qaeda. They chose wisely Al Arabiya"
Yes, right. They wisely chose Al-Arabiya (the Arab), who has been nicknamed Al-'Ibriya (the Hebrew), especially since the 2006 Israeli war on Lebanon and even more so after the Israeli attack on Gaza in Dec 2008, because its coverage is conceived by many in the Arab World as in line with Israeli propaganda.
Al-Arabiya portrayed the 2006 conflict as very much the result of Hizbullah's reckless actions, and the Gaza conflict as a result of Hamas's immature deeds. Regardless of political debates, that stance goes very much against the grain of Arab public opinion, and very much with the grain of Saudi-oil-and-US-dollars backed media.
Moreover, Al-Arabiya was the ONLY Arab channel that did not use the term martyr to describe CIVILIAN deaths in Gaza during the Israeli attack, which was considered deeply insulting by a large part of Arab audiences. Al-Arabiya editors later tried to explain that in Arab media conferences as part of "journalistic neutrality" but faced fiery remarks from fellow Arab media persons.
Al-Arabiya is the subject of major doubts in the Arab street, and of searing critiques by numerous notable Arab scholars.
Was President Obama's choice of Al-Arabiya really a wise choice?
Certainly not. He could have chosen a less controversial channel. The same country that hosts Al-Arabiya, the United Arab Emirates, has a number of widely-viewed TV channels. Abou Dhabi TV is one example. Dubai TV is another. ART in Egypt would have done it as well. These channels all have talk shows targeting the whole of the Arab world and famous political interviewers that are followed by pan-Arab audiences. And the interview itself would have been tougher and thus more credible.
More than 400 Arabic channel are viewed throughout the Arab World by satellite. That is the norm now and it has been like that for more than a decade. So I don't understand why this article is trying to portray the satellite transmission of Al-Arabiya as a merit or something unique. It is not.
Another weakness of this article is that when it is measuring the impact of the interview it is happy to rely on the evaluation of none other than the interviewer himself, and no one else! There was no effort whatsoever to pursue differing voices.
It is sad to see such amateurish and happy-go-merry articles on such sensitive subject as the American public diplomacy endeavors targeting the Arab World. Genuine scrutiny is indispensable to rescue such endeavors from their current underperformance.
