Throughout Marc Lynch’s Voices of a New Arab Public, in which the author paints a portrait of the effect of new pan-Arab media sources such as Al Jazeera on Arab public opinion before and during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the idea of an international public sphere and what it would mean if it weren’t, in Lynch’s words, “weak,” keeps popping up.
The most obvious Iraq-related example of how a western and Arab public sphere were hopelessly disjointed is over the issue of the suffering of the Iraqi people at the hands of US and UK-enforced sanctions. In the Arab world, particularly through debate on chat shows on Al Jazeera, the facts on that particular issue were not only well known, but became woven into debates over the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, the relative tyranny of Saddam Hussein, and nearly everything else. Narratives of the Iraqi people already being victims of American interests in the region were long entrenched in the Middle East before any American policymaker suggested US forces might be “greeted as liberators” upon invasion, but consumers of the American (or possibly American/western) media would not only have no way of knowing that identification with the suffering of Iraqis at the hands of Americans was nearly as uniform as anything else in the region, they had no way of even knowing about a UNICEF report estimating the death of half a million Iraqi children as a result of the sanctions directed at the Iraqi regime.
This is chiefly why Americans could not sell themselves as acting on the behalf of the Iraqi people, but without paying attention to the vibrant debate among Arabs about these facts, none of them would ever know it. Some of this must be put at the feet of the American and western news media for underreporting the effects of the strict sanctions on Iraq, and indeed more western public outrage might have made a difference. However, what is really shown here is not only ignorance of an uncomfortable fact, but an inability to understand and interpret smartly the internal debate going on inside a foreign public sphere. Indeed, this shows that the ins and outs of public opinion cannot translate currently from sphere to sphere. The international sphere is indeed weak.
But what I can’t put my finger on is what a true international public sphere would look like? Has one existed to any extent before? Some western news sources (BBC World News for example) do a good job of covering much of the world not discussed in the public sphere facilitated by US cable news for example, but is that the same as portraying how large trends, stories, and news narratives are interpreted differently in different places? Does international media consolidation in the hands of fewer people make an international public sphere more or less likely? Does new media create understanding across borders, or push people closer to a niche of information they want? I’ve been grappling with these questions, let me know if you have, too.
middleeastaidan 