Ibrahim Al-Abed, General director, Emirates News Agency, Advisor Ministry of Information and Culture, United Arab Emirates
One of the key tasks of the media is - or should be - to inform its audience, and to do so in a way that is both accurate and objective. Only thus can we hope to have a global community that comprehends the variety of the hopes, aspirations, heritage, history and achievements of the diverse countries, peoples and faiths that together comprise that community.
Yet, as we look around us today, we find that far too much of the media can be characterised, instead, as institutions that operate in such a way as to divide, rather than to unite, to promote distorted images of reality, rather than to enhance genuine understanding based upon facts, and to stimulate intolerance and antipathies, rather than understanding.
This approach has become more recognisable since the events of September 11th, 2001 in the United States, but it predates those events. Indeed, there is a convincing case to be made that, had the media operated in a different manner prior to 9/11, some, perhaps most, of the hostilities and misunderstandings between countries, cultures and faiths that have been such a feature since that date would never have reached their current level. If, for example, the media in the United States had explained more effectively - and more objectively - the nature of the Arab and Muslim world, US public opinion would have recognised that those responsible for 9/11 were in no way representative of the overwhelming majority of Arabs and Muslims.
This Forum provides an opportunity for the media of Eurasia, representing both East and West (however outdated those terms may be), to address some of the issues.
We should, I believe, first acknowledge the need to promote dialogue, and, through this, to eliminate, or at least reduce, misunderstandings. All cultures and faiths share many of the same fundamental values - the values of, for example, understanding and tolerance - as well as the same fundamental desires for justice and freedom. It is - or should be - the task of the media to disseminate this information. To be able to do so, however, it is not only important for the media, and its personnel, to be educated and informed. It is also important that it is free.
The different perceptions currently being created by the lack of objectivity of the global media are not matters of a merely temporary significance. They can - and perhaps will - affect views and attitudes for many years to come. One example is the coverage of the current conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Those media, which tend to support the Israeli approach tend also to present the conflict as one between two Governments, and two armies, and, as a corollary, between two peoples. Yet if one examines the nature of the conflict objectively, it is clear that it is, in essence, one where there is a state and a Government, equipped with armed forces that have overwhelming power and strength, acting as an occupying force, on the one side, and a weak administration, under occupation, with its people under occupation, with little in the way of power and strength, in the military sense, on the other side. To present it as a conflict between two Governments and two armies not merely does the truth a disservice - it also contributes in a very substantial way to misunderstanding at the global level about the nature of the conflict, thus helping, inter alia, to reinforce the strong in their conflict with the weak.
The role of the media, internationally, is, therefore, now of even more importance in a world where images and words flash so quickly around the globe, reaching almost all of mankind. Expressions of intolerance or antipathy generate, in turn, greater misunderstandings and resentments, and out of those can emerge hostility and extremism, even if only, initially, as a function of psychological self-defence. This is not, I should stress, simply a matter of the emergence, or possible emergence, of hostility and extremism in the Muslim world directed against the United States. Had there been less misunderstanding or less of a lack of understanding inside the United States about the nature of the Muslim world, then perhaps we would have seen less hostility towards the Muslim world as a whole being expressed by US public opinion in the aftermath of 9/11 as a result of the genuine, and understandable, shock caused by that tragedy.
In the media, we have a duty to our audience. A duty to inform, to explain and, on occasion, to advise. A duty, above all, to tell the truth - not half-truths, not distorted perceptions, not deliberate mispresentations.
Ultimately - and we in the media would do well to recognise the fact - the misunderstandings between the cultures, civilisations and the faiths of the world are not simply a reflection of our failure, as the media, to address and resolve those misunderstandings. They arise, in part, from, and have been fed by, our own faults. We are, in large part, to blame.
If we do not, in all honesty, recognise our faults in this sphere, and recognise our duty to correct them, then we will continue to contribute to the fog of misunderstanding and to the whirlwind of hostility and extremism that all of us, rightly, fear.
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