LAWRENCE Pintak considers this question in his provocative new book, “The New Arab Journalist: Mission and Identity in a Time of Turmoil” (I.B. Tauris, 2011). “There is,” he writes, “a new town crier in Marshall McLuhan's ‘global village' and he speaks with an Arabic accent”. Lawrence Pintak is a distinguished American journalist and scholar. A former CBS News Middle East correspondent, Pintak is the author of “Reflections in a Bloodshot Lens: America, Islam and the War of Ideas” (2006) and “Seeds of Hate: How America's Flawed Middle East Policy Ignited the Jihad” (2003). He is now the founding dean of the Edward R. Murrow College of Communication at Washington State University. Previously, he served as director of the Kamal Adham Center for Journalism Training and Research at The American University in Cairo. In his latest book, Pintak describes how journalists are breaking the mold and pushing the boundaries of Arab media. Their bold and brave efforts are shaping the future of news in the Middle East – and the world. These journalists are change-agents in their cultures and professions. “Twenty-first century Arab journalists,” Pintak writes, “are playing their part in creating the new Arab imagined community; for it is their identity and worldview that is echoed in, and reinforced by, newspapers, radio stations, and television channels across the Arab world every day as they write the narrative of a tumultuous and intensely complex new chapter in the evolution of Arab consciousness.” Lawrence Pintak discussed his stimulating new book with Saudi Gazette. Who are your journalistic heroes? Certainly, Edward R. Murrow, and not just became I am dean of a college with his name on the door (literally, we have the door from his old office, which says, “Mr. Murrow”). He really invented television journalism as we now know it with his reporting from London during World War II and later, his crusading investigative journalism. I grew up watching Walter Cronkite, then anchor of the CBS Evening News, and actually remember the evening when I saw a CBS correspondent doing a report from the Golan Heights and said, “That's the job I want someday”. And when I went to journalism school in the early ‘70s, we all wanted to be Woodward and Bernstein, the Washington Post reporters who broke the Watergate story and brought down President Nixon. I am much less impressed with them these days. Are Arab media voices being heard in America? Not very often and certainly not by the mainstream audience. The Egypt crisis has generated a great deal of discussion about Al Jazeera English and the audience watching it stream online has spiked dramatically, but that is still a tiny percentage of the population. Whenever someone tells me they can't get the Arab perspective I tell them that is not true. There are many English-language Arab publications available online – from the Beirut Daily Star and Egypt's Al Masry Al Youm, to The National in the Emirates and this newspaper. But only those who really want to seek out that perspective are reading them. Do you believe that Arab journalism is becoming a positive force for social change? Absolutely. We did a survey of Arab journalists a couple of years ago and found that 75 percent say that the primary mission of Arab journalism is driving political and social change. There is a new kind of journalism in the Arab world in the last decade or so; journalists across the spectrum are working to improve social conditions, increase human rights and reform the participatory political process. What are your hopes for the future of international journalism? My hope is that we see a plethora of voices and perspectives available to everyone. That sounds Utopian, but it is happening. In the Arab world, before Arab satellite TV, viewers were largely seeing international news reported through the lens of people like me, because Arab TV channels depended on Western news organizations for much of their international reporting. To a great extent, the same was true of Arab newspapers. Meanwhile, we in the West only saw things from our own perspective. To a large extent, that is still true in the US. But the massive cutbacks in American television coverage overseas means that US networks are depending more and more on international sources, which is slowly broadening the worldview. The arrival of truly “borderless” news organizations, like Al Jazeera English, which combines reporters and producers from so many countries, means we could be moving to an era in which news is presented through the prism of a broad worldview.
