Crowd-sourcing Tunisia: separating electronic rumor from reality
(Jan. 21, 2011) The Tunisian revolution is another reminder of the power of viral media. But it also underlines the fact that not all information is created equal. As they did during Iran's…
Reporting the Revolution: The New Voice of Arab Journalism
(Jan. 2011) The ouster of Tunisian President Zine El Abdine Ben Ali and the ongoing regional fallout are just the latest examples of the degree to which a media revolution has shifted the power…
Blogging in the Middle East: Not Necessarily Journalistic
By Lawrence Pintak and Yosri Fouda CAIRO – What is a journalist? In Western media circles these days, the boundaries are blurring between online newspapers like the Christian Science Monitor and…
Inside the Arab Newsroom: Arab Journalists Evaluate Themselves and the Competition
(Vol. 10 No. 2 April 2009) In the years since 9/11, much has been written about the alleged bias and lack of professionalism in the Arab media. The first cross-border survey of Arab journalists…
Border Guards of the “Imagined” Watan: Arab Journalists and the New Arab Consciousness
(Vol. 63 No. 2 Spring 2009) Media plays a fundamental role in the formation of national identity, most famously detailed in Benedict Anderson’s theory of the imagined community. In the Arab…
Obama starts well with Muslims but must do more
CAIRO (March 16, 2009) -- Perceptions are a critical piece of the foreign policy matrix. From the perception of the Islamic world, the Obama administration is ticking off many of the right boxes.…
The Murrow Option for U.S. Public Diplomacy
By Lawrence Pintak and William Rugh CAIRO (Feb. 17, 2009): Almost 50 years ago, President John F. Kennedy turned to America's most respected journalist to tell the nation's story to the…
Arab Media Wars: Hamas, Fatah and the Arab Media World
ABU DHABI (Jan. 23, 2009) – Surf the blogs in the Arab world and you find a common theme: the Bush administration has blindly supported Israel’s Gaza war and the U.S. media has been shilling…
Borderless Journalism in Gaza: BBC, CNN-I, and Al Jazeera English offer nuanced coverage of Gaza war
CAIRO (Jan. 21, 2009) – In television terms, Gaza has been déjà vu all over again. U.S. television has been dominated by talking heads parroting Israel’s talking points, the wide shots of…
Lessons worth learning: The Indonesian model
Issue 6, Fall 2008 What a difference a few thousand miles makes. I spent the summer in Indonesia, a vast and complex nation that is home to more Muslims than all Arab countries put together. When I…
The Mission of Arab Journalism: Creating Change in a Time of Turmoil
(Vol. 13 No. 3 July 2008) In the years after 9/11, the Bush administration repeatedly charged that the Arab media are biased against the United States. A cross-border survey of 601 Arab journalists…
Misreading the Arab Media
(May 25, 2008) “ARABIC TV does not do our country justice,” President Bush complained in early 2006, calling it a purveyor of “propaganda” that “just isn’t right, it isn’t fair, and…
