Media

Forget all the doom and gloom, the United Arab Emirates are going up, up, up! At least, that's what Rupert Murdoch, the conservative media baron and owner of News Corporation believes.

From the National>:

Fox International Channels, a subsidiary of News Corp, is making Abu Dhabi its regional hub for online advertising sales, documentary production and satellite television broadcast.

Murdoch and Fox are betting that the booming wealth of the Gulf states, combined with the enormous Middle Eastern youth population that consume media products produced in the Gulf, will spell big profits for online advertising in the region.

The New America Foundation's "dronology" tag-team of Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann released a new paper on the U.S. drone campaign in northwest Pakistan last week, and the accompanying Web page devoted to tracking all strikes since 2004 is the most exhaustive open source account of the drone war I've yet seen.

The Google Map documenting six years of strikes, sourced from publicly accessible press accounts, is highly useful, but the news value of the new NAF report is Bergen and Tiedemann's conclusion that the rate of civilian deaths from drone attacks is somewhere around 32 percent.

James Rainey, the Los Angeles Times' media critic, waded into the month-old controversy over New York Times Jerusalem Bureau Chief Ethan Bronner yesterday, concluding that Bronner should be allowed to remain in his post, despite his son volunteering to join Israel's army, the Israel Defense Forces.

In his piece, Rainey argues that Bronner is a skilled reporter who should be judged on the content of his journalism, not on potential biases and internal thought processes that nobody besides Bronner himself can fully understand.

Rainey makes a good case for judging journalists by their work, but he also sidesteps the most powerful arguments against Bronner's remaining.

Al-Jazeera is one of the big dogs -- if not the biggest -- among Middle East news organizations; that much is clear. But could the Qatar-based satellite television station's enormous influence wind up dooming the Palestinian - Israeli peace process as well? Jeb Koogler and Noah Bonsey, writing for the Columbia Journalism Review, seem to think it's possible.

One more word on Bronnergate: Al-Jazeera's Listening Post program did a thoughtful segment on the controversy this weekend. It discusses Bronner's son's service in the Israeli Defense Forces, but it also explores a bigger question: the extent to which Bronner is enmeshed in Israeli society, and how that affects his coverage.

Making news out of Yemen this week: Huthi rebels in the country's north have returned a prisoner of war to Saudi Arabia, and Christmas Day underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab told investigators that he trained with other English-speaking Al-Qaeda terrorists-to-be in the country.

Not making news out of Yemen this week: American aid to the hundreds of thousands of Yemenis displaced by the Huthi rebellion.

Update, 8:16 a.m. (from Gregg): Opposition Web sites are reporting (فارسی) a massive security presence in the streets: rows of riot police, some seven or eight deep, lining the streets along the route of the pro-government rally. Opposition groups are trying to organize rallies, but it sounds like (so far) they haven't been able to gather en masse. 

RAHANA, an Iranian activist site, is reporting dozens of arrests in Sadeghieh Square and other locations throughout Tehran. Sadeghieh Square is about one kilometer from Azadi Square, where the pro-government demonstrators assembled.

The New York Times' public editor, Clark Hoyt, thinks Ethan Bronner should be reassigned from the paper's Jerusalem bureau for the duration of his son's service in the IDF. He bases his recommendation mostly on avoiding the appearance of bias -- rather than any actual bias in Bronner's reporting.

The paper's editor, Bill Keller, disagrees:

It is, in addition to those things, a sign of respect for readers who care about the region and who follow the news from there with minds at least partially open. You seem to think that you... can tell the difference between reality and appearances, but our readers can't. I disagree.

Not to turn this into a media criticism blog, but I agree with Hoyt -- and with Evan, who wrote about Bronner last month.

This blogger's guide to writing about Egypt (h/t Marc Lynch)  is hilarious, and spot-on, and worth a read. Between this and Christian Bleuer's guide to bad Afghanistan writing, it has been a good month for takedowns of lazy foreign correspondents.

Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak is in for a year of rough economic news, but at least he got a good photo op (عربي) with the Egyptian football team after their African Cup of Nations win, right? Hosni and the Pharaohs. There's a joke in there somewhere. (You can also see Gamal Mubarak standing in the back of the photo.)

Al-Ahram doesn't miss an opportunity to take a shot at the Algerians: It faults the Algerian media for publishing "fabricated news" about the Egyptian team.

Electronic Intifada, a Chicago-based news and opinion Web site that covers the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, believes it may have indirect confirmation that the son of New York Times Jerusalem Bureau Chief Ethan Bronner was "recently inducted" into Israel's army, the Israel Defense Forces.

Electronic Intifada received a tip about Bronner's son -- similar to one which surfaced on the Internet months ago -- over the weekend and sent an e-mail to the Times inquiring about the tip and whether Bronner believed that, if true, it would be a conflict of interest.

Times Foreign Editor Susan Chira, in a bit of brusque, failed PR, responded with this:

Ethan Bronner referred your query to me, the foreign editor. Here is my comment: Mr. Bronner's son is a young adult who makes his own decisions. At The Times, we have found Mr. Bronner's coverage to be scrupulously fair and we are confident that will continue to be the case.

Here's something you don't see very often: Al-Ahram, the state-run Egyptian newspaper, published an article yesterday (عربي) praising Meir Dagan, the head of the Israeli Mossad.

The slightly bizarre article -- written by Ashraf Abu al-Hawl, the former head of Al-Ahram's Gaza bureau -- calls Dagan the "Superman" of Israel. It commends him for working to undermine Iran's nuclear program, and for opposing Hizballah, Islamic Jihad, Hamas and the Syrian government.

The Israeli state comptroller's office says the country is still doing a poor job in Arabic-language public relations (hasbara), according to a new report.

We haven't read the full document, because it's currently available only in Hebrew, which neither of us speak. But news reports say the comptroller slams the Israeli government for a lack of Arabic-speaking spokespeople, and for poorly-run Arabic-language radio stations broadcasting to the Gaza Strip, Syria and Lebanon.

Al-Jazeera's Listening Post program did a good segment on the underwhelming media coverage of Yemen. Video's after the jump.

I'm in it -- part of the reason I'm posting it! -- but I also think it's a pretty thorough treatment of where Western reporters have gone wrong on the Yemen story: the relentless focus on terrorism, the ignorance of Yemen's socioeconomic problems, and -- above all -- the endless references to "Osama bin Laden's ancestral home," a meaningless fact which Brian O'Neill rightly described as the cardinal sin of Yemen writing.

Update: Exum responded to me by e-mail, but I don't have permission to use it yet. However, I think it is safe (and important) to tell readers this: Exum did not advise the Obama campaign on Afghan issues. That renders moot most of my concerns regarding conflicts of interest and re-judging Exum's writings in context. More to come later.

Marc Lynch flagged this poll of Jordan's media-watching habits (عربي) from the Jordanian newspaper Ad-Dustour.

35 percent of Jordanians say Al-Jazeera is the most reliable news network, making it the country's most trusted news source. Jordanian TV continues to fall in popularity: Just 13 percent of Jordanians think it's the most reliable network, down from 16 percent last year, and 33 percent in 2004. Al-Arabiya continues to slip, as well.

We're a few days late on the story of Cihan Hayırsevener, but I feel it's important to note the real danger some journalists face, especially those working in the Middle East.  Hayırsevener, the 53-year-old editor in chief of the Güney Marmara'da Yaşam (Life in Southern Mamara) newspaper, was shot three times in the leg on Friday and later died of his wounds.

Hayırsevener had been reporting on a local corruption scandal and had received at least one death threat, Hürriyet reported. The assailant fled in a car immediately after the shooting. One of the shots ruptured a major artery in Hayırsevener's leg, and despite making it to a hospital in the town of Bursa, he died that night.

Meanwhile, a suicide bomber halted outside a press club in Peshawar by police blew himself up on Tuesday, killing himself, a policeman and a club employee, Al-Jazeera reported. After the jump, a photograph of Hayırsevener seconds after the shooting (warning: graphic).

A couple of news items in the past two days demonstrate the ways in which technology and mathematics are increasingly playing a role in 21st century warfare and, incidentally, how some reporting might misunderstand some technical - but important - details. Today, the Wall Street Journal broke a story about how insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan have "hacked" into U.S. Predator drones using $26 off-the-shelf technology and "intercepted live video feeds" from the Predators' cameras.

Only, I don't see how that's actually possible. The three-member WSJ reporting team led by Siobhan Gorman only mentions one program, the Russian-made SkyGrabber, and although their wording suggests other software might be in play, SkyGrabber doesn't seem capable of intercepting and relaying live video feeds.

Hamas political-leader-in-exile Khaled Meshal, usually a denizen of Damascus, was in Yemen a couple days ago, apparently to serve as a mediator between Yemen and Iran, the scholar-journalist tag team over at Waq al-Waq noted in their Wednesday Arabic newspaper roundup.

They link to an القدس (al-Quds) piece by Khalid al-Hammadi on Meshal's presence, but the link doesn't seem to go to the actual story. I found only one other mention of Meshal's visit after a couple Google news searches, in a Spanish-language publication called Aurora, which offers "Everything about Israel and Judaism in Spanish."

Meshal met with Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh, according to Aurora, and made some public statements about obstacles in the peace process, vis-a-vis a prisoner exchange for Corporal Gilad Shalit. No mention of Meshal's purported role in tamping down the heated rhetoric between Iran and Yemen, which blames Iran for supporting the Houthi rebels.

The English language really doesn't allow me to express just how monstrous Tom Friedman's worldview is. His column today argues that the Iraq war wasn't about weapons of mass destruction; instead, he says, it was a kind of giant social experiment, with Iraqis as guinea pigs. We decimated their country, killed hundreds of thousands of their siblings and friends and neighbors, and forced millions more into exile because we wanted to "partner" with them.

In a rational country with some standards of accountability, Friedman would be unwelcome in polite company. In the United States, he gets invited to lunch with the president.