Arab Media Debate

Abu Aardvark reports on the debate in the Arab media over whether to seat the Iraqi Governing Council in the Arab League. (Incidentally, the AL did give them a seat.) I link to this primarily because when most Americans hear about the "Arab media," it's some radical story about Westerners poisoning food or water, and hence people conclude the Arab media is a hopeless problem and part of the reason "they hate us." As someone who has read a fair sample of the Arab media and was responsible for updating the our department's "Middle East Media" site (though I didn't read all the sites we link to), I can tell you things are much more balanced and intelligent than that.

Al-Jazeera in particular takes a lot of grief, some probably warranted: I tend to look at them as an Arab version fo FOXNews more than anything else. But they're still reasonable. I've changed the sidebar link to their English site. Go see for yourself whether the media portrayal of this network fairly represents what you see.