Enunciatory Television

CULTURAL POLITICS 399 REPRINTS AVAILABLE DIRECTLY FROM THE PUBLISHERS. PHOTOCOPYING PERMITTED BY LICENSE ONLY© BERG 2006 PRINTED IN THE UK CULTURAL POLITICS VOLUME 2, ISSUE 3 PP 399–402 BOOK REVIEW ENUNCIATORY TELEVISION SIGURJÓN BALDUR HAFSTEINSSON Al-Jazeera: How Arab TV News Challenged the World, Hugh Miles, London: Abacus, 2005, 438 pages, $24.00/£10.99, PB ISBN 0–349–11807–8 This book is an intellectual journey through the culturalandpoliticaldevelopmentandimpactofthe Qatari television station Al-Jazeera (meaning “the island” in Arabic). After a personal introduction, in which the British journalist Hugh Miles explains his motivations and desires to write the book, he offers eleven voluminous and wide-ranging chapters. The first two chapters describe the setting for the foundation and operation of Al-Jazeera in the Arab world in the late 1990s. The next seven chapters depict media events or media scoops, like the second intifada in Palestine,September 11th,the war in Afghanistan, and the war in Iraq. These events and scoops brought AlJazeera renown in journalism, politics, and the public arena worldwide. In the remaining two chapters, Miles discusses the political implications of the programs, politics, and policies of Al-Jazeera in different communities in the Middle East, Europe, and North America. > SIGURJÓN BALDUR HAFSTEINSSON IS A PH.D. CANDIDATE IN ANTHROPOLOGY AT TEMPLE UNIVERSITY, USA. HE IS COEDITOR OF THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE VIEWER: MEDIA ETHNOGRAPHY AND THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF AUDIENCES (1996). HE IS CURRENTLY DOING FIELDWORK IN CANADA ON ABORIGINAL MEDIA. CULTURAL POLITICS 400 BOOK REVIEW Al-Jazeera is embattled on all fronts. Miles,for instance,examines how Al-Jazeera was set apart and banned in 1998 by the Arab States Broadcasting Union, while other private Arab radio and television broadcasters were invited to join the organization. Al-Jazeera’s advertising revenues from other Arab states are also very low because neighboring Arab countries, like Saudi Arabia, dislike the channel for its democratic and critical take on social and political issues. Similarly, the station has, since the war in Afghanistan and later Iraq, carried a heavy load of casualties among its reporters and suffered bullying by the United States. The headquarters of Al-Jazeera in Kabul, for example, were deliberately blown up by the Pentagon, and similar instances have happened in Iraq during and after the war. As Miles points out, this questionable treatment by the West did not go unnoticed by groups labeled radical, such as the Chechnyans, the Hamas movement, and, later, Al Qaeda. Such treatment partly explains why these groups have chosen Al-Jazeera to express their views to the world. Miles’ book contextualizes Al-Jazeera on several levels, making it an exciting read and a major contribution to Media, Cultural, and Political Studies. First is the cultural setting, and its importance for journalistic practice. Al-Jazeera seems to be extremely significant for Arab states in the production of contemporary Arab societies,culture, and identity, not only as a potential catalyst for social change but also as an advocate for liberal democratic practices like responsible journalism. The results of such practices on the screen, however, are different from those of Western media. Miles argues that this is because of deep cultural differences between the people who are making editorial choices in Arab and Western countries as well as the different audiences that they are pitching to, particularly when it comes to questions concerning freedom of the press. Second, Miles states that Al-Jazeera has “broken the hegemony of the Western networks and,for the first time in hundreds of years,reversed the flow of information, historically from West to East” (p. 278). Edward Said wrote in Orientalism (1978) of the misconceptions that Westerners have had about the Orient, which entail “Arabs” as prototypical, having intrinsic traits like dishonesty, and anti-Western views. This depiction, Said argued, has served the West well but was and is a redundant and inaccurate depiction of diverse societies and cultures in the region. Not much has changed in the West since 1978, it seems. Al-Jazeera is viewed by the political mainstream in the West as having Orientalist features, like a menacing agenda and religious fundamentalist views of the world. Another interesting discussion Miles takes up...