Al-Jazeera Unmasked

The Egyptian-American scholar Mamoun Fandy once famously wrote that there are no real journalists in the Arab world, and anyone who thinks Arab satellite television has a constructive role to play "is at best deceived, or at worst a liar or ignorant." Indeed, the Qatar-based Arabic network Al-Jazeera is often condemned by pundits as "jihad TV," its journalists labeled "killers with cameras." Now Marc Lynch, an associate professor of political science at Williams College who runs the popular Middle East blog abuaardvark.com, has set out to prove that consensus wrong. The result, "Voices of the New Arab Public: Iraq, Al-Jazeera, and Middle East Politics Today" ( 320 pages. Columbia University Press ), is a closely argued and highly provocative study that calls for a far more nuanced Western response to Al-Jazeera.

Asserting that "it is manifestly untrue that the Arab media are dominated by a single perspective," Lynch points out that often the most hostile critics of Al-Jazeera neither speak Arabic nor bother to watch the programs they castigate. In contrast, Lynch has amassed a wide range of network data, allowing him to analyze "what Arabs themselves have actually said." They include the full transcripts of 967 episodes of five of the most important Al-Jazeera talk shows, a separate database of those episodes that dealt specifically with Iraq and another containing thousands of opinion essays published in Arabic newspapers. His conclusion: Arabs are "relentlessly bombarded" by their media not with crude propaganda but with diverse "political arguments."

In 1999, long before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, more than a dozen Al-Jazeera talk shows criticized the absence of democracy in the Arab world. In response to revelations of the torture of Iraqis by Americans at Abu Ghraib prison, the network's most popular show, "The Opposite Direction," provocatively discussed conditions in Arab jails. "In this new Arab public," Lynch writes, "Islamists and feminists square off over women's rights... Kurds openly challenge Al-Jazeera on its own broadcasts over its alleged silence about Saddam's mass graves."

America, he adds, should stop "scapegoating" the Arab media for U.S. policy failures in the region. Then it may find a partner for progress and reform. What is certain, is that this subtly subversive book will quickly become the focus of what is too often a shrill debate over the role of the Arab media.