The Post-Modernism of Al-Arabiyya TV. I like Anthony Shadid, but I certainly don't like Nabil Khatib, the editor of AlArabiyya. When I first saw this piece in the Washington Post yesterday, I braced myself. I never ever see a piece in the US press on Arab media that I like. Not for anything, but those who write those articles don't know Arabic. How would you like if I write a piece on Russian media--I should write a book on Russian media just to bug you. That is an apt analogy. But of course I know that Shadid is different, and the piece was better and more nuanced than your usual. But when Shadid was at the Boston Globe, I remember him telling me that he was struggling with the study of Arabic, and I hope that his Arabic has improved. But the piece does not contain an independent--Shadid's independent--evaluation of the station. That makes him vulnerable to the opinions and influences of his interlocutors. He did cover criticism of the station, but you can only understand the station if you watch it regularly. Rashed is good in duping Western journalists not because he is sharp--he is not--but because he knows that they know that he knows that they don't understand Arabic. So he can make his fantastic claims about "professionalism" as he told David Ignatius. You have to watch Al-Arabiyya's coverage of King Fahd's death (it is mentioned but not extensively in the article) to really understand the situation, and to see how all its claims are being undermined before your own eyes. And then Rashed talks about covering news about health and arts. No, they cover the fluff "news" of American morning shows, and they do so with special angle of sleaze. But what got my attention about Khatib is this: "He talked about the stories behind each headline: Iraq, Iran and, then, in an unusual choice of words, "the Palestinian territories." Rarely is that phrase heard in the region. It's usually Palestine, a word that can convey a sense of territory as well as justice. But Khatib, a Palestinian, seemed to be making a statement: that his phrase was less ideological, and that he wanted to avoid ideology as an editor." Notice what is considered "ideological" and what is not considered "ideological." This is like the famous US academic who wrote the End of Ideology book in the 1950s. The American ideology is not an ideology, it is above ideology, just as the Saudi school of jurisprudence is theoretically away from and above the four schools of Sunni jurisprudence. Notice that "Palestinian territories" is considered in that newsroom non-ideological, but notice that the standard only applies to one side only, unless Khatib also refers to Israel as "the Zionist entity." You see objectivity, in the Western context, is only a one-way street: you only apply objectivity to the Palestinian side, and sympathy and bias in favor of the Israeli side and standards is considered "neutral." This is how bias in the globalized media works. And then Khatib waxes postmodernist: ""Since then," he said, "the only thing I feel strongly about is that I shouldn't feel strongly about what is right and wrong." He should have added that he does not feel strongly about right and wrong when it applies to enemies of US only. Oh, and Shadid is quite inaccurate when he refers to Ash-Sharq Al-Awsat as "influential". Influential where, and to whom? To the royal family? Yes. When you look at circulation figures of newspapers in the Arab world there is not a single "influential" newspaper. There are influential TV stations, and Al-Hurra is not one of them, and I am told that Al-Arabiyya is also not one of them. I also doff my hat to Muhannad Khatib, the former anchor of AlArabiyya who resigned in disgust, because it is quite courageous to attack the station given the monpolistic Saudi ownership of Arab media.