Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World (review)

236 SAIS REVIEW Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World. By Edward W. Said. New York: Pantheon Books, 1981, 218 pp. $10.95 ($3.95 paper). The emotion has passed now that the hostages are home, but it seems that no significant reassessment of Islam has yet taken place in America. Columnists are still trying to rehabilitate the shah, and the nightly news still airs stories designed to shock rather than inform. In Covering Islam, Edward Said exposes misperceptions of Islam and shows how partial media coverage usually finds what it wants rather than what is there. The three-part book looks First at coverage of revolutionary Iran, then at reporting about Islam in general, and finally discusses Middle East area studies in America. Said cites numerous media reports that contain ignorant generalizations about "Islamic characteristics" — generalizations that, in Said's view, amount to racism. He argues that there is no "Islam," but rather a variety of peoples from the Philippines to Bangladesh that happen to observe related religious practices. Nor, he maintains, is there a "dark" side to Islam. Atrocities perpetrated in Northern Ireland or Jonestown are seen in their political and social contexts; consequently, those associated with Islam should be similarly assessed. In Said's view, the campus violence that preceded the downfall of the shah need not represent an "Islamic penchant for martyrdom," but should instead be compared to the phenomena of Kent State or Berlin. In the first part of the book, Said attacks columnists who offer more opinion than fact, but reserves his harshest criticism for the television networks, major newspapers, and opinion magazines. The New Republic reprinted a parochial seventeenth-century piece entitled "The Turk" and called it a "classic study" of Middle Eastern culture. Such an absurdity may have resulted merely from a small magazine's excessive partisanship , but Said argues that willfully biased coverage in the major media may have obstructed a possible early accord between the American and the revolutionary Iranian governments: So poorly and with such antagonism did the press report Islam and Iran during 1979 that it can be suspected that a number of opportunities for resolving the hostage crisis were overlooked and perhaps this is why the Iranian government suggested early in 1980 that fewer reporters in Iran might quiet the tension and promote a peaceful resolution. Said blames reporters' ignorance and the inflexibility of the news system. He shows how bits of knowledge, the proverbially dangerous "little learning," passed for inside scoops. For example, Flora Lewis of the New York Times failed to use her extensive political experience in analyzing events in the Islamic world. She took a crash course in Orientalism and came out with a second-hand knowledge of the Arabic language ("rhetorical and declamatory, not intimate and personal") and the Islamic mind (not capable of "step-by-step thinking"). In contrast to such half-baked experts, Said holds up two journalistic models: the objective observer (in particular, I. F. Stone) and the area expert (for example, journalists at The Guardian and Le Monde). Said's argument becomes less straightforward as he develops a second theme. The American news system plays an important role in government, and lifelong dissidents, such as Stone, are in fact exceptions within that system. American journalists are provided with much inside information, made easily available by democracy. The remarkable openness of this process means that American reporters typically are inclined to subsribe to the consensus of their sources. On CBS, Walter Cronkite, with BOOK REVIEWS 237 his seemingly endless day-count, did not help explain the crisis in Iran but simply voiced America's feelings. Prominent columnists, in particular, are often too close to the political establishment and sometimes support policies in print that they helped shape in government. This American "insider" writing contrasts with reporting in Europe and elsewhere, where journalists often are starved for information and tend to be antagonistic toward policymakers. Foreign governments seldom help their journalists see the outside world. At this point, Said seems to be saying that not only did U.S. reporters do a poor job of covering Iran and Islam in general...