Nabil Khatib at MEP event
Tell us about the project that you are working on with Internews.
I was working in Ramallah just when the Oslo Accords were signed and we [Palestinian journalists] got busy developing Palestinian media. When I moved to Dubai 10 years later, I realized how important the role of Arab media was in the current situation. Palestinians rely on pan-Arab media for news, more than on their own media, and for people in the Gulf, North Africa and Levant, to say the least, media can help people open up, represent the views of the public, as well as channel the rich flow of information that would explain what is going on in respective countries. For example, there is a unique situation in the GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council] countries, where media often rely on professionals from other Arab countries. Lots of experts and journalists never feel secure covering local issues and have a high level of self censorship because if they upset somebody, being expats, they would lose their jobs, and if they lose their job, they would be asked to leave the country. These are the rules of the game there. It is essential to invest in local citizens so they realize their roles as journalists. This is what triggered in my colleagues and myself, the importance of investing in real training and production of new media that could change the scene, and offer more local news. People there follow local news on pan-Arab media now. They don’t know much about their own reality or they just whisper what they know and write news that is not credible or they ‘gossip’ on blogs, but not real credible news.
So that’s how the idea grew, and it required investment in media in the Middle East and North Africa. It became a unique opportunity to have something that is tied to the industry to make sure that the indicators for success are there and the chances for success are there by connecting it to leading media like Al Arabiya and MBC. The executives of MBC group and Al Arabiya agreed to host it in the heart of the industry, in the same newsroom, so people will have this unique opportunity. Imagine that you would be trained in the newsroom of NBC News or Fox News or CNN in an organized manner although you are still an intern. This is the substance of the idea, and we are desperately working in partnership with Internews and the University of Missouri School of Journalism to find supporters. Of course, when we first brought up the idea, everybody thought, ‘You are talking about having a training center in the richest Arab countries, so why do you need resources or financial resources?’ My argument would be, those who have the resources in the region are not necessarily interested in free media so you need to help by developing it, but you would not necessarily get their support; you could do it the other way around.
Are there other things like this in the region?
There are attempts to have trainings, but they are all based on commercial interests. They are all part of the economic scenery there where everything is business, and you don’t need to worry about ethical concerns or the citizen political concerns; it’s only about how to do things in a way that will help you make money or for PR reasons.
There is also the Al Jazeera training center, for example, with all due respect, but it is something that has only the name/brand of Al Jazeera. The trainings do not necessarily make use of the skills of Al Jazeera employees. They would not be transformed into the training methodologies. The region is in need of opening up and looking at things in a rational way. In Abu Dhabi, there is a training center with names like Reuters Foundations, BBC Trust, Thomson. There is one representative from each foundation helping with training, but it’s about profit-making efforts for existing big media outlets.
To bridge the gap between the industry and training and to bridge the gap between what citizens would expect from media and what media can offer is something I believe nobody has worked on in depth in the region. Somebody can say this is all nice talk. The criteria would be how to implement things and make it successful. The very fact that you have an industry standard-bearer, Al Arabiya, that is already a successful private investment, is independent and is ready to host this project and cooperate with this effort is a unique opportunity that needs to be taken, especially in the heart of this conservative region, where people are not used to presenting their views and news in a free way.
There is a unique opportunity now because since 9/11, everyone realizes that there is a need for change and reforms. But how do you do it in a way that is safe? How do you not to shake everything and rock the boat and turn it upside down—this is the dilemma. I believe media can play this essential role of creating a smooth transition, by exposing people to different ideologies, ideas, experiences and cultures in a smooth way. This is something that MBC does, by the way, but the missing part is how you can make sure that citizens really are informed about their lives. Not that they listen to different and credible and un-credible gossip that can be defeated by any official who can prove that this is untrue. So you need to make it credible, so people will believe in it, and it can influence them and their choices in life. This is what’s not being done so far, and it can be done because now there’s a window of opportunity.
That seems like a continuum as at first you create Al Arabiya, which does that at a broad level, and now you move to the local?
A pan-Arab/regional media cannot do the local part, but without the local efforts, you cannot do it at all. At the end of the day, a Saudi or Emirati or Kuwaiti or Omani or Egyptian or Moroccan is worried most about, if he is sick, if he will take himself to the hospital, can he afford it or not, and does he get good service. This is what the radicals would use. I mean, they would convince less fortunate and even middle class people that ‘you are living in a country where the regime is corrupt, and the only solution is to come to us because our way is the right way and is the way to paradise.’ And this is where the danger is: because of the language where people talk about details and examples from daily life. Here, you need somebody who can offer information that would not cover up corrupt people or regimes but would give people other alternatives about how to think if they are dissatisfied with the reality they are in. In case there is a democratic choice, they would know how to make the choice because they would be informed. It is a lengthy and difficult process, I believe, but lots of effort is needed at different levels and layers, and this is one of the essential ones.
Can you step back a second and tell our audience about Al Arabiya and what your goals and editorial goals as executive director are?
Al Arabiya was established days before the start of the Iraqi war in 2003, and the main idea was to have a news channel that could offer Arabs a rational way of presenting mainly regional news and slowly, slowly try also to offer local news wherever it is applicable. So, in case there are elections, in case there is big news in a certain country, you cover it in depth. This is how you try to combine covering regional issues and covering local issues.
The dilemma used to be that since 1948—which was at once the war, the establishment of Israel, and the Nakbah for the Palestinians and at the same time it was the years of national independence from mandates and from foreign colonialism in the region—most of the corrupt regimes in the Arab countries made use of the issue of Palestine-Israel to convince their own communities that they are living in misery because the regimes are busy liberating Palestine. And it never has been the case actually, I would claim, but it used to be a good excuse. So, all the media that used to be controlled by governments, whether newspapers, radios, TV stations, when they appeared, they used to focus on regional news, which was the Arab-Israeli conflict. It helped them to escape from talking about the real local issues—not out of love to the Palestinians or the conflict necessarily. This is how the regional news used to be and was portrayed: from a negative point. It showed things as continuous war, which the respective regime is busy with fighting. That used to be at the expense of the local news. It is important for Arabs to know what is happening in Iraq or Lebanon or Palestine/Israel, but they need to know about local issues, and they never did as needed.
The idea was to present news, not to be negative, but to be constructive. Package the news with some respect for the viewer, ‘these are the facts,’ and it’s up to you to be popular without being populist. Try to redefine the news, as not only about bad stories and about the wars; but also about success stories and successful individuals in the region. The news should be about lifestyle and health; about stories of education and challenges that are facing local communities in the Arab world. This was the main challenge to Al Arabiya. You would be offering a kind of news people never used to perceive as news, because you’d never see a piece of news about health invention as a second headline on a TV channel.
I remember five years ago, I had to argue with my colleagues, news producers, for several hours to convince some of them that a piece of health news is worth a fourth spot in a news bulletin. Because for them, they grew up in a community where a headline can only be about a bombing or a political statement or a visit of somebody; it cannot be about health. When they ran it, they were surprised that people were calling desperately to find out, ‘Where is this innovation? How can I make use of it?’ They realized slowly that this is also news worth looking at because at the end of the day, they want to be successful. So, it was difficult to redefine what the news was, not only for the public but for some of my colleagues inside in the newsroom.
After six months there, Al Arabiya was one year old, and Samantha Shapiro wrote a New York Times Magazine cover story on us. She spent one month at Al Arabiya and wrote an article “War in an Arab Newsroom” because she saw that nobody was thinking like the other politically or ideologically, but we were trying to have a homogenous way of presenting news. So, regardless of how you think about things, how we present news differently, you are not here to make a case and play a role as partisan. You are here to be a journalist and your obligation is to satisfy people’s need for information, and it is not up to you and your ideology to decide how to present that.
Surprisingly to a lot of people, it worked, and it gained viewership and more and more ad revenues. And if other leading news channels would make three to five percent of their expenditures in ad revenue, Al Arabiya in six years would cover 65 percent of the budget. So, we are close to breaking even, although we avoid being populist in a region where people are angry, people are frustrated with everything and the easy way to be popular is by being populist. So, if you are not tackling the issues that people are used to hearing about, and you still become popular, it is an achievement.
Apparently, people want to listen to positive news. It’s not about talking positively about things and making them nice and rosy. No, it’s just telling people what’s happening. There’s lots of news about health, lifestyle, etc, because people like to talk about these things and hear about them and see them.
At one stage, people in Iraq and Afghanistan were passing so-called exclusives, tapes of Zarqawi and bin Laden, to news channels. Al Arabiya management decided we cannot air them in full because we would be a platform for them. Instead, we would only air whatever is valuable news. And so Zarqawi and bin Laden, and others alike, realized it was not best to send their tapes to us. This was a serious decision as there were those in the channel who feared we would lose popularity if we stopped getting those tapes. But Al Arabiya decided not to air them in full, and afterwards, our competitors didn’t feel a threat associated with airing only what was newsworthy. Instead of competing with fanatics, we went to the positive example, and that became the standard in the region. That was an essential thing, and it needed courage and support from executive management.
In Iraq, in five years, we lost 11 colleagues to fighting parties. Wherever a party felt we were not satisfactory to them, they would kill a member of our staff. So, the Al Qaeda people bombed our office and killed five of our colleagues. Other extremist groups from different sides killed other colleagues. So, 11 colleagues. And with the twelfth there was a serious attempt to assassinate him. He is in a wheelchair and moved to work in our newsroom. We even lost two reporters and one cameraman by American military fire at different times. It was a heavy price, but it was something on which Al Arabiya couldn’t compromise.
How do you deal with questions about Al Arabiya’s funding? People say Al Arabiya is based in Dubai, and Al Jazeera is based in Qatar. Al Arabiya is funded by the Saudis, and Al Jazeera is funded by the Qataris, and it’s kind of a big fight. How do you react to that?
Al Jazeera is in Qatar and is funded by Qatar, that’s true. Al Arabiya is part of MBC Group, which has private investment and is part of the private sector. It is owned by Saudi investors. It is not owned by the Saudi government. And of course, MBC Group has business interests in Saudi Arabia, so to go against those interests would be a suicidal thing from the business perspective, because this is the reality in the region—that’s true.
But at the end of day, what matters in my view is the product, especially in media. It’s like a dress. Somebody would say this is a dress made by the late Yves Saint Laurent and you’d say it’s about the product. It’s not about whether Saint Laurent was a good guy or a bad guy; its about what he’s producing. This is how we would judge things—by what they do. You judge people by what they do, especially in media. You judge the product, because the product has the impact. It’s not about the intentions. You can study the intentions always and check. It is not up to me to talk about the intentions. Rather, it is for people to judge by judging the product. And we can see by content analysis, by whether the content appeals to people, whether it makes sense, whether it is constructive or not.
In my view, there were attempts to portray Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya as reflections of the competition between two Gulf countries, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. But if you do some basic content analysis, you will find that the news related to Saudi Arabia or Qatar is minimal in both. It is about how Al Jazeera covers the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, how Al Arabiya covers the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, how Al Arabiya covers Iraq and how Al Jazeera covers Iraq or Afghanistan. It’s about how we cover local issues in Morocco or not. And here is a very essential point in my view.
The big difference between offering free information and news from one side and offering free views from the other side is that it might attract people when they see that ‘oh wow the Arabs are talking freely about a controversial issue.’ That’s fine, and that’s nice, but this is not what would make people more informed about reality. If they listen to Nabil Khatib saying something on TV that is controversial, anybody can undermine or discredit Nabil Khatib because at the end of the day, it is the opinion of Nabil Khatib. But if Nabil Khatib is offering an investigative report or a news report that is credible with credible information, then nobody can discredit the news report. They can try, but if it proves to be truthful, then people will trust it, and this will affect people’s beliefs and perceptions about things. So, yes, there was a time when some news channels started offering news debates, debates about views, different views in an attractive way. And people in a place like the United States, with all due respect, who don’t know the culture, they thought this was a ‘wow’ thing. It’s amazing that people had the courage to talk about things they never used to talk about. People in the region would look at things differently and believe it is more influential and important and constructive to have people realizing their daily life issues than listening to two views about them. Views are good, but not at the expense of dissemination of free information about reality. This is what we are missing in the region. This is what is so difficult, getting that news, because you get to that news via your network of correspondents, and those correspondents are working in countries where they are repressed, and they are fearful, and they might be called to the intelligence every day and every night because they will be passing information that the respective government or regime would not like to disseminate. So, talking about views is always easier. And the main challenge for non-democratic powers in the Arab world is in the world of free information and not the controversial views, in my view. So this is where Al Arabiya is trying to make a difference and offer something different in the region.
What kind of impact do you think you’ve had thus far?
I will tell you a story, and maybe it will answer that question. When the crisis of the so-called ‘Danish cartoon’ took place, there was a Friday where people were called to go into the streets and to demonstrate against the guy who drew the drawings and Denmark—not only the newspaper, but Demark as a whole, Europe, the West, Christianity, the Christians. There were attempts to make it a continuation of the war between religions. The organizers called people to go to the streets, and it was a Friday in February. The day before that, there was a major catastrophe in the Red Sea where an Egyptian ferry had an accident, and 1,500 people were dying or died. We didn’t know yet.
We had an editorial choice. Where do you focus more? It was a tough choice because the assumption was that people will go to the streets and that would be an interesting scene for a regular journalist—conflict, people shouting, maybe tear gas will be used. It’s ‘action,’ so we need to focus there. It’s a more controversial issue. And there was the other view that there are 1,500 families who don’t know anything about their relatives, and that this is a more actual and important thing. So, yes we would cover what was happening on the streets, but we would focus and have breaking news on the current issue of people’s lives’ under threat in the Red Sea.
And it took us too long to debate this internally, because it needed somebody, leadership, who would risk, for the sake of the principle of the right of the families of the Red Sea accident victims to know, that we assume this is more important for the public. And we went that way. We covered the issue of the cartoons. We invited the prime minister of Denmark, who tried to explain to Muslims that as a prime minister his role is not the same as king or president in the Arab world. He has no say over what a newspaper would publish, and he would never be able to have a say on that. This is the nature of the system. So he explained his views. Then we invited one Saudi Muslim and one Danish Muslim; so people for the first time were exposed to an idea that there isn’t one truth only because the Danish Muslim was saying something different from the Saudi Muslim. So, there can be differences, and we closed on that.
But we opened the air continuously checking on the victims of the ferry. And I was worried, of course. My conscience was okay, and I was proud of what the channel did, but we were worried about the ratings at the end of the month, because then the managment would get concerned when the ratings went down. So at the end of February, the ratings were higher by one-third, and we were kind of puzzled about that. And even my boss said, ‘maybe there is something wrong with the ratings.’ I said, ‘maybe, but maybe also the cameras were focusing on 500 people with posters that were well printed, which somebody organized and orchestrated and paid for and invited the cameras to take the shot of only 500 in streets of Amman or Cairo or Beirut or Morocco, so that we would get the impression that this is the whole mass in the Muslim world who are going against Denmark, when it’s only hundreds of people. And people were actually interested in the humanitarian story that we told, God knows.’ We said, ‘God knows.’
Since then we have continued to go up and up for the next six months, so there’s no room to say it was a mistake because the results continuously showed positively that our ratings were going up. And they were going up in the most conservative societies in the Gulf, where people are very religious and very conservative socially and religiously, and they chose us as their source instead of the others who kept talking all day about all the demonstrations in the world against the West. So at the end of the day, this would show, maybe, the impact of showing people that there is another alternative, that there is something else, there is another view, there is another angle to look at things. And the research shows, continuously, that people accepted this, and liked it; not only did they accept that, they liked it. So, that could be an indicator of success, if we are to believe those researchers. At least the advertisers believe them, and our revenues are going up.
Al Arabiya was chosen to do the first formal interview with President Obama when he became president in his effort to reach out to the Muslim and Arab world. About a year and a half later what is your assessment of this effort? Has it changed the perception on the street? How is his effort perceived?
I believe there were hopes, and there still are hopes, that there is new leadership in the United States chosen by the people of the United States. It’s not something that was imposed on them. Having Obama as the president, with his views on how things should go in the world, means this is the choice of the American people because they democratically chose him. It’s difficult to check exactly in one and a half years whether his interview on a certain channel like Al Arabiya talking to the Arab and the Muslim world had a specific impact which you can measure.
But if all the studies about the way America is being perceived in the region are showing a positive curve in comparison to how the United States and its foreign policy were perceived during the Bush Administration, for example, that would be thanks to two things: One is the policies themselves and how they are perceived in the region, and second, the media that conveyed these policies and portrayed them in the region.
Because you can always present Obama’s point of view, and then immediately after bring several commentators criticizing in a row—with the same voice—his views or you could bring on two people with two views on his speech, for example, and put it in the right context.
The second take is ours usually, this is what we would try to do. Because what we usually do on Al Arabiya is if somebody like Obama gives a speech, we would have people with different views assessing Obama’s speech or input in the region or in the world. So people would listen to different perspectives. Others would bring also different people, but everyone is on the same note talking negatively about Obama or about U.S. policies.
Back to the famous interview, as professionals and individuals, we were overwhelmed and happy that we got the newly elected president of the United States. And the way the interview was quoted in more than 2,000 media outlets around the world immediately—quoting him and quoting Al Arabiya, which did the interview with him—showed that he chose a platform that has recognition and respect around the world.
I believe that he is going the right way in terms of convincing the world and the Arabs, and Muslims in particular, that he would like to be a partner, and he doesn’t want to dictate. People can disagree with him or agree, but all reasonable people will realize that nothing can be changed especially in international politics in one day or one year, two years, or even three years because things take time. But it’s about how things are going, and what the curve looks like, and people know that the United States took a decision to withdraw from Iraq and the last election showed that Iraq dealt with elections differently than five years ago, and this is a result of certain policies. I believe the picture is much more positive than before, and if the effort will continue the same way, then it will continue the same way. And we are still hoping to get the second interview with the president.
When you wrote for us in 2007, you wrote about Yitzhak Rabin and you said that in order for there to be progress, that we can’t start from scratch every time. What is your sense of the efforts this time around with this administration on working to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict as opposed to what you were saying in 2007?
What I believe the major problem used to be in the last years was that the administration chose to manage the conflict without resolving it; asking two parties in an antagonistic conflict to agree and then they will get the blessing of the administration on whatever they agree to. You cannot just facilitate in a nice way. You need to have a position and a clear position, and tell the parties that they need to agree, and we can facilitate, but you need to have a position, somehow. And this position shouldn’t be pro-Palestinian or pro-Israeli; it can be a reasonable position, the same as what we are monitoring now, where the administration is offering, ‘this is the minimum that should be accepted, and please tell us your views on that.’ I believe even if Obama would offer both sides the Clinton parameters again, neither of the parties would be happy to accept them as they are. But, at least there would be a platform where you can start discussing things. So you are, as an administration, setting the agenda for the talks, and you don’t leave it to both parties, who may not be capable or aren’t interested in making significant process. Although I’m not optimistic that things might be resolved soon, unfortunately, I think this would be the right approach.
