By Morand Fachot, European Broadcasting Union Communications Service Over 400 news professionals and executives representing the world's major news organizations, safety experts, and media specialists gathered in Vilamoura, Portugal, for the third edition of the News Xchange conference in mid-November. With media coverage of the Middle East--in particular of the …
Read More »News Xchange 2004, Algarve Keynote Address: His Majesty King Abdallah of Jordan
Day 1: Thursday, 18 November 2004 Eason Jordan (Chief News Executive CNN): Thank you and good morning. In the Middle East these are extraordinary times. The war in Iraq. The death of Yasser Arafat. In Iraq, the Palestinian territories and in Israel there is suffering, anxiety and new hope. Also in …
Read More »A Plea from Parents: No More Public Murders
Reprinted with permission of the International Herald Tribune. The victims have not been exclusively of one nationality or religion, but indeed are representative of humanity itself: British, South Korean, Egyptian and American, among others; Catholic, Jewish and Muslim. As more people continue to be taken hostage and brutally murdered in Iraq, …
Read More »To Show or Not to Show? Graphic Images in TV Media
The recent profusion of graphic televised footage of dead bodies, sometimes charred or disfigured, has raised difficult ethical and journalistic decisions for news editors, whether at CNN or the Hizbullah-backed Lebanese channel Al-Manar. In a series of interviews, news editors talk about their decision-making policies on screening disturbing images. The …
Read More »The Best Hope for Democracy in the Arab World: a Crooning TV “Idol”?
It is a perfect summer evening in Damascus; a cool wind sweeps in from the desert, soothing scorched pavements and carrying the smells of strong coffee and cured meat from roadside stalls up into the clotheslines and concrete hulks of the Syrian skyline. Normally the city's streets would be packed …
Read More »The Dark Desert Night is Alight: The Impact of War Visuals on Television Viewers and Print
This paper was presented at the Broadcast Education Association's annual convention in April 2004, where the author participated in a panel organized by the association's International Division. The dark desert night is alight with streaks of blue and red streaming across the sky. A mosque is the symbol-laden backdrop for …
Read More »The Proposed Satellite Television Channel of the Organization of the Islamic Conference: A Response to Moral Panic?
I. INTRODUCTION The Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) held its ninth conference in Doha, the Qatari capital, during November 2001. Members decided to establish an Islamic English-language satellite television channel. The main aim of such an initiative is apparently to educate the West about "real Islam," in light of …
Read More »Not Every Picture Tells a Story: A Death in Falluja
This article first appeared in The New York Times. All of life seems to be about denial--the denial of death, the denial of reality, the denial of everything that is convenient for us to deny. Photography, because of its causal relationship to the world, seems to give us the truth or …
Read More »On a Journey with Hamza Yusuf
Hamza Yusuf Hanson was born in Walla Walla, Washington, and raised in northern California. He became Muslim in 1977 in Santa Barbara, California and subsequently moved to the Middle East and studied Arabic and Islam for four years in the United Arab Emirates and later in Medina, Algeria, Morocco, and …
Read More »Amr Khaled: Broadcasting the Nahda
In the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, 2001, renewed fears about the threat of "Islamic Fundamentalism" conjured images of bearded and turbaned zealots spoiling for holy war against the West. More than three years later, such stereotypes seem confirmed in the grim reality of the morning's headlines, as …
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