Doha, Day Two (1)

This morning I did my panel at the al-Jazeera Forum.  It was an okay panel, though a bit frustrating at the purely technical level.  The sound system was a real problem - I couldn't hear my fellow panelists, or the questions from the audience, because of the reverb and distortion, and when I first started to talk I was interrupted by a nasty feedback burst.   The format of the panel wasn't quite what we had been led to expect, either.  We had been told to have prepared opening statements, but instead the chair - Riz Khan - asked us questions, which kind of put the prepared statements into the trash. 

Despite that, I think it was an interesting and reasonably successful panel.  I mainly talked about the need for Americans to pay closer attention to what Arabs are actually arguing about.  I suggested that instead of aiming for agreement, so that Americans and Arabs would emerge with the same opinions on political issues, we should be aiming for a slightly different goal:  that they are having the same arguments.  More engagement with each other's arguments, not just in a point by point way, but in the sense of an active, ongoing participation in the debates.  I suggested to the al-Jazeera International team that they should consider doing English versions of the al-Jazeera talk shows - the same topics, the same style, but in English.  I noticed Faisal al-Qassem in the front row, so I suggested him as a possible host - which seemed to amuse him enormously.  Hopefully I'll get the chance to ask him whether he thinks it's a good idea at some point.   Finally, I argued that while al-Jazeera and the other satellite TV stations had done an enormous amount to open up political debate and so forth, the Arab media as a whole could not take the next step until strong domestic media emerged to grapple in a serious way with local issues. 

Other than that, the panel had high points and low points, as you'd expect.  Munir Shafiq annoyed me a bit with a blanket condemnation of the Western media, and got a sharp rebuke from Samira Kawar (Reuters, I think).  Fahmy Howeidy was spot on, as I'd have expected, and made some great points about the continuing centrality of state power in all this - the media's one thing, but the state continues to be the crucial problem blocking progress.   I'm sure there was more, which I'll remember later.

Since the panel, I've just been hanging out talking to people.  A particularly fascinating conversation with Ayman Safadi, editor of the Jordanian newspaper al-Ghad, which hopefully I'll say some more about later.  Nice chats with Qassem and Howeidy, with Hassan Fattah of the New York Times, with various al-Jazeera people, and lots of other folks.  Which reminds me that I really should be getting back out to the conference, instead of sitting here blogging about it!

UPDATE:  <a href="http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog">Ethan Zuckerman</a> and <a href="http://arabist.net">Issandr el-Amrani </a>are both blogging from the Forum.  If I find out about anyone else, I'll let you know. 

Comments

[raf*]

dear aa,

but ... but ... but ... DID you meet joumana al-namour?

--raf*

www.aqoul.com

[Laila El-Haddad]

hmm, you should put in a good word for he neglected aljazeera.net english correspondent (and blogger!) here in Gaza who got dissed from the conference and apparently AJI too! ;0 you should also tell them there is a lot of criticism of the fact that AJI is only hiring english peeps, not arabs, even arabs with perfect american accents and a harvard education (because, after all, in the end we're ay-rabs).

[mediafanatic]

The issue of who AJI will chose to represent them to an English-speaking public is really interesting, as the last commenter pointed out.

How do you think the terminology on AJI will differ from its Arabic-language counterpart? For instance, I have noticed they are using "human bomber" on their website but not really using that term in the Arabic counterpart. What do these types of differences mean?

[Nur al-Cubicle]

For US public diplomacy, I say leave it to aardvarks!