14-Sep-06: Manipulating the Media: Frank Exposure, Courtesy of Reuters

How honest, accurate and untainted by ignorance, malice or influence are the news media that tell us what's happening in the world?

Imagine a headline that said: "Zionists Urged to Buy Influence in World Media". Think that might get some attention?

Would a report that quoted a major Jewish leader saying "Jewish tycoons should buy stakes in global media outlets to help change anti-semitic attitudes around the world" get reported? Would it be discussed on talk-radio, the Guardian's op-ed page, Malaysia's cartoon pages? Would it be a major story on ABC, BBC, CBC, CNN, Al-Jazeerah?

Now let's stop the speculating. Here's a true story -- only it's about Moslems, about Islamic power and about an authentic, formal, organized bloc of 57 nations that act in unison to control nearly one-third of the votes in the United Nations General Assembly.

Below is the actual, unedited form of yesterday's story as published by Reuters. After you've read through the text, please also read the comments we've added at the end.

Muslims urged to buy influence in world mediaWed Sep 13, 2006 2:12 PM BST

RIYADH (Reuters) - Muslim tycoons should buy stakes in global media outlets to help change anti-Muslim attitudes around the world, ministers from Islamic countries heard at a conference in Saudi Arabia on Wednesday.

Information ministers and officials meeting under the auspices of the 57-nation Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC), the world's largest Islamic body, said Islam faced vilification after the September 11 attacks, when 19 Arabs killed nearly 3,000 people in U.S. cities in 2001.

"Muslim investors must invest in the large media institutions of the world, which generally make considerable profits, so that they have the ability to affect their policies via their administrative boards," OIC chief Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu told the gathering in the Saudi city of Jeddah.

"This would benefit in terms of correcting the image of Islam worldwide," he said, calling on Muslim countries to set up more channels in widely-spoken foreign languages.

Muslim stakes in Western media are minimal. Billionaire Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal owns 5.46 percent of media conglomerate News Corp., the Rupert Murdoch-run group behind the Fox News Channel. The U.S. channel is generally seen as right-wing and no friend of Arab or Muslim interests.

Washington's response to September 11, invading Afghanistan and Iraq and tightening civil freedoms at home as part of a wider "war on terror", has created a widespread feeling among Muslims worldwide that their religion is under attack.

A row earlier this year over Danish cartoons that depicted the Prophet Mohammed deepened the sense of a divide between Islamic culture and the West.

"The fierce attack on Islam in the five years since the September 11 attacks has forced us into a defensive position on our faith and understanding of our tolerant religion," Egyptian Information Minister Anas el-Feki said in a speech.

"Now more than ever we need a new Islamic media message that reaches all parts of the world," Feki said, citing Israel's recent 34-day war in Lebanon as one issue where Muslims needed to make their views and influence felt.

To this, we'd like to add several comments.

1. About the OIC's Role

We've spoken publicly in the recent past about the Organization of the Islamic Conference (also referred to as the Organization of Islamic Countries.) Apart from hosting the conference described above, the OIC's actions are the main reason why the United Nations has failed, after years of inside efforts, to adopt a convention against terrorism. You can see the background to this in Arnold Roth's speech to the 3rd International Congress of Victims of Terror, reprinted here. The OIC's ability to frustrate all attempts to comprehensively outlaw terrorism constitute a remarkably under-reported, largely-unknown and shameful story.

2. About the Influencers

The way Reuters chooses to describe the influence of Alwaleed bin Talal is odd, to say the least. It says:

"Muslim stakes in Western media are minimal. Billionaire Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal owns 5.46 percent of media conglomerate News Corp..."

And that's it. No other investments, no other investors. So how minimal is minimal?

Alwaleed bin Talal is surely worthy of a touch more attention than Reuters gives him. In addition to being a member of the Saudi royal family, a nephew of King Abdullah and the the richest Arab in the world with estimated net worth of US $20 billion, he is ranked by Forbes as the world's eighth richest person. Wikipedia says: "He has been nicknamed by Time magazine as the Arabian Warren Buffett."

This comment itself is an interesting observation since Alwaleed also holds a vast stake in that same Time magazine, a holding worth a billion dollars or more. This gives him a voice in the affairs of CNN, Time and a long list of other media properties.

His 5% holding in News Corp gives him a stake in the world's largest publisher of news in the English language: 175 papers, plus TV stations, magazines, radio, book publishers and film production studios. He's also invested in the dominant Italian media conglomerate Mediaset, in the Asia-and-Europe-wide TV network SKY and in many other media properties. In addition, a $9 billion stake in Citicorp gives Alwaleed some modest degree of influence in other parts of the global business landscape.

A man who understands what money can buy, Alwaleed donated $20 million each to Georgetown and Harvard Universities in 2005. This was the second largest donation that Georgetown has ever received. Its Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (CMCU) is now renamed the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding.

3. How Effective is This Sort of Investment?

Middle East Online quotes Prince Alwaleed himself boasting of its effect:

During last month's street protests in France, the US television network Fox... ran a banner saying Muslim riots. [Alwaleed says:] "I picked up the phone and called Murdoch . . . (and told him) these are not Muslim riots, these are riots out of poverty. Within 30 minutes, the title was changed from Muslim riots to civil riots."

The Prince is quoted in a Washington Times column explaining that his largesse as aimed at "bridging the understanding between East and West... for peace and tolerance." The columnist, Diana West, observes:

Funny how that bridge goes only one way. We won't ever, for example, see a Saudi prince (or anyone else) plunk down cold cash to expand -- or even establish -- Christian studies in Saudi Arabia, where exercising freedom of a non-Islamic religion is a crime.

We should point out, that in some circles, Alwaleed's holdings are themselves shrouded with question marks. As The Economist said in a penetrating and very readable analysis from 1999: "Anyone who seeks to present Prince Alwaleed as the face of the new Saudi Arabia needs to explain the mystery that lies at the heart of his empire."

Perhaps it's this shroud of uncertainty that renders Reuters so modest in its claims about his influence and that of other Arab and Moslem potentates.

4. About a "New Islamic Media Message That Reaches All Parts of the World"

This isn't the place to repeat what antisemites have said all the way down history: that the Jews control the banks, the media, the movies, the water supply and the rest. The haters will keep saying what haters say, and the rest of us will try to avoid being drawn into an ignorance-laden, prejudiced and pointless debate.

People who want to have influence and advance their private agendas have always had the means available to do this by wealth, by economic power, by war. Alwaleed is no exception and he's not alone in his ambitions, though perhaps exceptionally well-placed to achieve it. But we're dealing here with a different, threatening and more dangerous situation - one that's characterized by a barely-disguised degree of collaboration, co-operation and lofty self-justification.

Alwaleed is not the only player in the creation of a "new Islamic message". The conference that sparked this report is, after all, a global international conference of governments and their ministers. Not just some governments, but governments that have nearly a third of the United Nations in their control. And as we observed above, control is the right word since the fact is they do act in a united, co-ordinated way.

That's one of the reasons the OIC exists.

Ignoring the slightly tortured English of their website, the OIC's secretary-general Ihsanoglu says their efforts are about international co-ordination. He "expressed certainty of the possibility of achieving success and professionalism in joint Islamic information action based on human capabilities and high-level professional capacities of the Islamic world which have proved their merit and competence in the various Islamic media such as TV channels, radio stations, newspapers and websites."

Meanwhile the Saudi Undersecretary for Culture and Information, Dr. Abdullah Al-Jasser, this week "drew attention to the fact that the Islamic world faces today formidable challenges and biased world media actions that have enormously prejudiced Islam and Muslims through news, information and programme manipulations. This urgently necessitates the quick access of Islamic States to the global information society, not only by possessing and utilizing technologies, but also by upgrading content."

The word jihad doesn't appear in the press releases but its spirit seems to be there. As a group speaking with a single voice, the Islamic nations say they're grievously provoked and they absolutely have to fight back. And they see the media as a critical battlefield.

If you're searching for signs of critical self-examination by these states and their reps, don't be too hopeful. When it comes to the overwhelmingly Islamic character of global terrorism, something that troubles most of the world, don't waste your time searching for analysis on the OIC website. It's evidently not a problem of theirs. On the contrary, their pre-occupation as a global group is with rebuffing suggestions of an Islamic connection to terror (the link is to an OIC speech by Malaysia's former prime minister who addressed this theme repeatedly). The terrorism problem is mainly a problem of perceptions in the West, they say, with Islamic states and Moslems among its principal victims. The solution therefore is in changing those Western perceptions.

Are there Arab and Moslem victims of Moslem terror? Of course - vast numbers of them; we know some personally. Does this mean that Islam is unrelated to global terror and its cancerous spread in the past decade? Of course not. Islam is at the very heart of the cancer. It's impossible to comprehend terror without looking closely at the role Moslems play in its growth.

The organized Islamic governments, all 56 of them, are hardly hiding their intentions, leaving the rest of us to wonder how much of an impact their Islamic war against Western perceptions is now, and will be, reflected in the news reporting, analysis and pictures that get to our pages and screens.