UPDATED - ColdType

had taken off. This time, there were 37 of us. I
was again the only American journalist there,”
Arnett said.
MEDIA AT RISK
HE did not rule out the possibility of an attack on
Western media targets in Iraq along the lines of
the bomb that went off at the hotel housing NBC.
He said many Iraqis working for Western companies
and media were under threat. There are
half a dozen very good newspapers and in six
months there could be more broadcasts too.
“I just bought a satellite TV for US$ 105 with 320
channels,” he confided. “There is more Iraqi
environment in the media, but US still dominates.”
He pointed out that the U.S. has won the
war, but has lost the information war. “Today, it is
impossible for anyone to control the media.
There is no embedding anymore.” On this point,
I was struck by a report in the Guardian that
many of the Iraqi minders in Saddam’s Ministry
of Information whom western journalists denounced
for obstructing coverage are now working
for western news organizations.
PILING ON WESTERN MEDIA
THERE was an ongoing debate between Arab
journalists and their western counterparts. Jihad
Al Khazen of the Al-Hayat newspaper, a long
time Reuters correspondent claimed that the
Arab media was more objective in its coverage of
the Iraqi war compared to western media”. Clive
Myrie, a BBC correspondent who had been
embedded with British forces in Basra disagreed
and, said that the issue should not be reduced to
a beauty contest between the Arab and western
OCTOBER POSTSCRIPT
287
media. “We are all involved in getting to the
truth and that is what we should be doing,” he
said.
He argued that the western media is not a single
monolith that thinks alike but consists of various
perspectives and processes. He was very
candid about the limits of the embedding
process and shared some of his criticisms of the
US coverage with me in an interview I did for a
film I am doing on the media coverage of the war.
Also critical: Yousef Ibrahim, the former New
York Times correspondent, who covered the first
Gulf War. He combined his critique with praise
for Arab satellite TV outlets “The brilliant part is
that we now have a voice that is listened to at the
CIA and at the White House. It is now a question
of quality. We have an opportunity now. Arab
satellites have become a force to shape public
opinion and finally, the Arab world has an outlet
to answer the Western media back.”
Al Arabia Editor-in-Chief Abdullah Bra Aswan,
was also supportive of the new very competitive
Arab TV. “Arab satellite TV is opening up the
minds of the people. They now know about corruption
and the other ills...We may have lost the
war, but we have won the media battle. For the
first time we can make our voices heard.”
MONOPOLY BROKEN
AN often quoted US based expert on the Arab
world, Dr. Hisham Sharabi, of Georgetown University
said the Western and Arab Media view
each other with a distorted eye. But added that
the monopoly of the Western media has been
broken by the new Arab media led by the likes of
Al Jazeera and Abu Dhabi TV.
A more fascinating view of Arab media was