Al-Jazeera correspondent Ayman Mohyeldin is on a victory lap in the United States – or rather, Al-Jazeera, the Qatari satellite television station, is sending him on its own victory lap. After all, Mohyeldin is a modest guy, despite being one of Al-Jazeera’s best-known reporters. And he is, clearly, a rising international media star.
Al-Jazeera has good reason to gloat: it has new cachet in the United States after millions of Americans, hungry for on-the-ground reporting from Egypt, turned to its online live stream and, therefore, to Mohyeldin’s coverage from Cairo’s Tahrir Square. So now Mohyeldin is in the United States for three weeks of media events – there will even be a Gentleman’s Quarterly photo shoot – having become well known in a country where viewers are essentially prevented from seeing his station’s broadcast.
The network has been targeted by the U.S. government since 2003, when former Vice President Dick Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld described Al-Jazeera as being tantamount to an arm of Al-Qaeda. Two of its reporters were later killed in Baghdad when an American tank fired on the Hotel Palestine, where, according to U.S. officials, it was believed that a spotter directing fire at U.S. troops was located. But, because Al-Jazeera was known to have based its team in the hotel, the channel and others voiced suspicions that the channel’s reporters had been deliberately targeted.
And, to this day, Al-Jazeera, which, together with BBC News, has become one of the premier global outlets for serious television news, is virtually impossible to find on televisions in the United States. The country’s major cable and satellite companies refuse to carry it – offering access to American viewers only in Washington, D.C. and parts of Ohio and Vermont – despite the huge public demand.
So Al-Jazeera is sending its news team around the United States in an effort to “mainstream” the faces of this once-demonized network. And Mohyeldin can sound like Robert F. Kennedy: When the cry rose up from Tahrir Square hailing Mubarak’s abdication, he commented, “One man stepped down and 80 million people stepped up.”
The station’s push in the United States could hardly be more necessary – to Americans. By being denied the right to watch Al-Jazeera, Americans are being kept in a bubble, sealed off from the images and narratives that inform the rest of the world.
Consider the recent scandal surrounding atrocity photos taken by American soldiers in Afghanistan, which are now available on news outlets, including Al-Jazeera, around the globe. In America, there have been brief summaries of the fact that Der Spiegel has run the story. But the images themselves – even redacted to shield the identities of the victims – have not penetrated the U.S. media stream.
And the images are so extraordinarily shocking that failing to show them – along with graphic images of the bombardment of children in the Gaza Strip, say, or exit interviews with survivors of the Guantanamo prison – keeps Americans from understanding events that may be as traumatic to others as the trauma of the terrorist attacks of Sept.11, 2001, was to them. For example, the leading U.S. media outlets, including The New York Times, have not seen fit to mention that one of the photos shows a U.S. soldier holding the head of a dead Afghan civilian as though it were a hunting trophy.
So, for the sake of the United States, I hope that Al-Jazeera penetrates the U.S. media market. Unless Americans see the images and narratives that shape how others see us, the U.S. will not be able to overcome its reputation as the world’s half-blind bully.
Indeed, Egyptians are in some ways now better informed than Americans are (and, as Thomas Jefferson often repeated, liberty is not possible without an informed citizenry). Egypt has 30 newspapers and more than 200 television channels. America’s newspapers are dying, foreign news coverage has been cut to three or four minutes, at most, at the end of one or two evening newscasts, and most of the American television channels are taken up with reality shows.
I met Mohyeldin before a recent public appearance of his in Manhattan. His analysis of the Egyptian revolution, and of the other revolutions in the Middle East, is that the kind of globalized media to which Americans do not have full access in fact created the conditions in which people could rise up to claim democracy. He pointed out that “[p]eople are aware of their rights from the Internet, from satellite TV – people are watching movies and reading bloggers. This was a revolution of awareness, based on access to fast-traveling information. The farmers, the peasants in Tahrir Square, were aware of their rights.”
Americans have a hunger for international news. It is a myth that they cannot be bothered with events in the outside world. Maybe Americans will rise up and threaten to boycott their cable and satellite providers unless they are allowed to watch Al-Jazeera – and other carriers of international news. They would then come one step closer to being part of the larger world – a world that, otherwise, will eventually simply decide to leave Americans behind.
By Naomi Wolf
