War of ideas: The more you hear, the less you like?
Key to Washington's efforts to get its message across to the Arab world are two Arab-language networks – Radio Sawa, begun in 2002, and Television Alhurra, launched in 2004. Backed by $78 million in federal funding this year, the efforts are meant to duplicate the success of Voice of America and Radio Free Europe during the Cold War. The networks have garnered their share of both accolades and criticism, but now comes controversial research alleging that they could actually be making matters worse.
A new study by Mohammed el-Nawawy, a communications professor at Queens University in Charlotte, N.C., surveyed 394 Arab college students in five Arab countries on the credibility of the two networks. Nawawy found that once students began watching and listening to the networks, their attitudes toward U.S. foreign policy, in fact, worsened slightly.
The study, "U.S. Public Diplomacy in the Arab World: The News Credibility of Radio Sawa and Television Alhurra in Five Countries," is in the August issue of Global Media and Communication, an academic journal. Nawawy surveyed students in Morocco, Kuwait, Jordan, United Arab Emirates, and the Palestinian territories, and he concluded that U.S. officials face a tough time changing Arab hearts and minds. The bottom line, he writes: "No matter how savvy its public diplomacy efforts ... they will be ineffective in changing Arab public opinion if that public is dissatisfied with U.S. policies on the ground."
Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which oversees the two networks, issued a blistering response to U.S. News about the study. "It is astonishing that a flawed study such as this would appear in a peer-reviewed journal and looks more like a conclusion in search of a reinforcing study instead of the other way around," he wrote. "It does not meet the universally accepted standards of international media research. Its sample is too small, it is skewed by population with nearly half the respondents identified as Palestinian, and some of the respondents were not even listeners or viewers."
"I did not have a predetermined agenda," fired back Nawawy, who insists he followed well-established guidelines in preparing the study. "But I expected the BBG to be unhappy with the study outcome. ... I just thought that it would have been beneficial to work together to try to strengthen the U.S public diplomacy efforts in the Middle East instead of criticizing a study which simply conveyed the opinions of a sample of Arab students who were available to take the survey at the time."
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