The real reason Obama picked Al Arabiya for first TV interview - Kansas City Star

The real reason Obama picked Al Arabiya for first TV interview In an effort to reach out to the Muslim world, President Barack Obama granted an interview this week to Hisham Melhem, Washington bureau chief for theAl Arabiya network.In an effort to reach out to the Muslim world, President Barack Obama granted an interview this week to Hisham Melhem, Washington bureau chief for the AlArabiya network.
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After Hisham Melhem scored the first TV interview with the new U.S. president, Melhem was treated like a rock star on his own network, Arabic news channelAl Arabiya.
“You deserve all this celebrity attention in light of your interview,” gushed an anchor on Al Arabiya during a newscast. “How is the U.S. president? … Didhe joke around? How is he as a human being?”
“He’s very humble and a gentleman,” said Melhem, the network’s Washington bureau chief, whose interview with Barack Obama aired Tuesday. “He maintaineda normal relationship with his assistants. He’s very cool. It’s like a mountain that can’t be shaken by the wind.”
Meanwhile, the Washington press corps heralded Melhem’s journalistic coup as the Obama administration’s imprimatur on Al Arabiya, based in Dubai in theUnited Arab Emirates.
“The channel is seen as a prominent voice of moderation in the Middle East, preferring calm analysis to what many see as rival Al-Jazeera’s more sensationalcoverage,” noted Time magazine.
Perhaps, but I can’t help wondering if the real reason Barack Obama’s people chose Al Arabiya was the same reason that George Bush also favored Al Arabiyawith an interview in 2004. The Americans knew that the Saudi-owned news channel was not likely to subject the president to a tough interrogation, as hewould’ve certainly gotten on Al-Jazeera.
One commentator argued that Al-Jazeera’s recent wall-to-wall coverage of Israel’s siege on Gaza made it a bad choice for Obama to proclaim a message ofpeace in the Middle East.
I would argue the opposite: that the president would’ve gotten much more mileage from his message had he delivered it on Al-Jazeera. That network commandsthe respect of millions more viewers than the low-rated Al Arabiya precisely because of its relentless reporting on news events like Gaza.
It is worth noting that even in the darkest hours of the Gaza bombardment, when casualties were piling up, Israeli officials willingly appeared again andagain on Al-Jazeera, enduring the kind of aggressive Q-and-A that’s rarely seen in American TV journalism.
Perhaps that is why, on the same day that Obama was chatting with Al Arabiya’s Melhem, another president, Jimmy Carter, was promoting his new book in aninterview with Riz Khan on Al-Jazeera English. Unlike Obama’s remarks, Carter’s words were broadcast over Al-Jazeera in both Arabic and English, in Palestinianterritories and Israel.
Carter believes Obama should eventually sit down with Hamas. That is an option Obama does not favor, and Al Arabiya’s Melhem should have raised the matter.Astoundingly, he chose not to.
You can watch Al-Jazeera English live by downloading the player at www.livestation .com. As for Al Arabiya, it is one of several Arabic-language newscaststranslated into English on the nightly news digest “Mosaic” on Link TV (www.linktv.org).
Read much more about the media at Aaron’s TV Barn blog. Go to KansasCity.com and click Entertainment.