Mideast: Wealth of Information and a Dearth of Knowledge

Finding something positive in the Persian Gulf crisis is as easy as finding a needle in a sand dune. But try this.

Education.

There was a time when the only knowledge most of us had about the port of Aqaba was that Peter O’Toole led an Arab army that took it from the Turks in “Lawrence of Arabia.” Big movie, bigger information gap.

As ongoing war preparations in the Gulf area have intensely focused our attention on this region about which most Americans previously knew very little, however, we’ve become a little smarter than we were before Iraq’s Aug. 2 invasion of Kuwait.

If Vietnam was the living-room war, then this has been the living-room war buildup. Whether TV, radio or newspapers, there’s no escaping this story, which has made hostages of the media (including some TV critics) just as Iraq President Saddam Hussein has made hostages of Westerners and others under his control.

Other major stories rarely rate more than headlines in those reedy 22-minute network newscasts that these days are stuffed with news of U.S.-Iraqi tensions. In some cases, other news just ceases to exist. In the last three weeks, in fact, ABC, CBS and NBC each has aired newscasts that contained stories only about the Gulf turmoil.

It’s a trade-off. Although viewers are at least temporarily dumber about the world, they’re surely a little wiser about Arabs.

Just as TV coverage of the uprising in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip earlier humanized the Palestinian quest for nationhood, coverage of the Gulf crisis has gone still further in shattering the stereotype here of Arabs as a Middle East monolith with the face of an oil sheik or terrorist.

On the screen now are many Arab faces--from Iraq to Saudi Arabia to Jordan--each with a distinct personality. The media coverage has been at least an introductory course on Arabs for many United States viewers, if somewhat short of an in-depth lesson.

“I hope the complexities are becoming better known,” Jawad George, executive director of the National Assn. of Arab Americans, said from Washington. “I think the (American) people have seen that the Arab governments have different interests and objectives, and that not all Arabs are attacking American objectives. The differences in life being found by American troops in Saudi Arabia (and reported on by TV and newspapers) are another way of projecting the Arab culture.”

But will this quickie course dissolve the thick residue of ignorance and prejudice built up over years?

“I don’t think that in a crisis of this sort, one has the opportunity to undo 40 years of the negative caricaturing that has taken place,” said James Zogby, executive director of the Arab-American Institute in Washington.

Zogby likens this once-runaway negativism to “a bus coming at you 100 m.p.h.,” adding:

“The media have finally said, ‘Stop! We’re now defending the people (the Kuwaitis and Saudis) we have been defaming as oil sheiks with illegitimate wealth. They are now the good guys.’ But the difficulty is that we have not gained any deeper insight into their culture and the Gulf that we had before. So we’ll go on to another crisis without any understanding of what got us into this one.”

Zogby and George both praise CNN’s coverage of the Gulf crisis. “I don’t know the background of Jim Clancy (CNN’s first correspondent in Baghdad, Iraq, during the crisis),” Zogby said, “but whatever it is, he got his feet on the ground real quick and has just been extraordinarily good in bringing excellent people to the table. And his commentary has been impeccable.”

That’s in contrast, Zogby believes, to the reporting by many of Clancy’s counterparts. The problem is that most of the Gulf reporting is being done by generalists (CBS correspondent Robert Simon is one exception who comes to mind) with only superficial knowledge of the area.

Mosques and other Middle East scenes make for a dramatic setting, but these props in many cases are little more than a sort of wallpapering of the news.

There should be more to the coverage, Zogby said, than “sending in anchors who become like tourists, getting backdrop shots and interviewing the big guy (a head of state or high-ranking official) with no understanding of . . . the situation.”

Nor is Zogby any easier on the countless recyclable pundits who have been showing up on TV during the Gulf crisis. Zogby, who holds a doctorate in Islamic studies, himself has done done up to 80 media interviews--”about normal for a crisis of this type”--since Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. But he credits only NBC’s “Today” program and CNN’s “Crossfire” (on which he appeared Monday) with welcoming the “new voices and new perspectives” of Arab-Americans on the Gulf crisis.

Elsewhere, Zogby says, he and other Arab-Americans are asked to comment only on issues directly concerning other Arab-Americans. “The pundits they interview about issues are the ones who have very little knowledge about the Middle East area.”

For example, he lambasts Henry Kissinger, who has been a frequent advice-giver on TV during the crisis. “No one stops and asks how come he is wrong all the time,” Zogby said. “He’s wrong because he has literally stopped functioning except to do these kinds of shows.”

Media and short memories go together. Thus, pundits who turn out to be wrong during this Middle East crisis--whether Kissinger or Zogby himself--will get the opportunity to be wrong again during the next one.