Reaching Arabs Via Airwaves

It’s 4:15 p.m. and Nasser Husseini, a commando in America’s new war of influence in the Middle East, is bopping and sweating inside his tiny glass box in the bowels of the Voice of America building.

Husseini doesn’t read the news. He pours it into the mike, fast and fluid, punctuating each headline with an electronic exclamation mark. Then comes the hit music.

You’ve heard the sound a million times on commercial radio. This, however, is Radio Sawa, compliments of the U.S. government. And there are no commercials. The AM/FM Arabic-language station went on the air in March, beamed across much of the Middle East in place of the traditional Voice of America shortwave broadcasts.

And Middle East youth actually appear to be listening. Sawa has already become the No. 1 music station in Amman, the Jordanian capital.

Sawa is being hailed as a model for how the United States ought to revamp its troubled communications with the Muslim world. Reaching the youth who make up 60% of the Arab population--and who are the targets of Islamic fundamentalist recruiting--is seen as especially important.

Yet despite its success--or because of it--Radio Sawa has plenty of detractors, at home and in the Middle East.

Sawa’s skeptics say its pop music and punchy newscasts may well appeal to Arab youth but won’t mitigate hostility bred by unpopular U.S. policies, poverty, corrupt local regimes or Islamic fundamentalism.

Nevertheless, argues Sawa news director Mouafac Harb, “Winning hearts and minds cannot happen before winning ears.”

Some of America’s Middle East allies--including Egypt, the recipient of nearly $2 billion in U.S. aid this year--haven’t allowed Sawa’s signal to be transmitted.

One Arab editorialist dismissed Sawa as slick propaganda, and expressed hope that if kids listen to the music, they’ll at least tune out the news. But Jordanian Information Minister Mohammed Adwan, whose 15-year-old daughter tunes in, wants Jordanian radio to copy it.

U.S. critics who find no bias so far in Sawa’s brief newscasts still question whether the station will be able to hold its audience if, under political pressure to give taxpayers their money’s worth, it begins to broadcast more speeches and statements by the American government. Already, it is lengthening its newscasts.

And Voice of America journalists question whether Sawa’s news will be as unbiased or as substantive as its predecessor’s because it’s not under the sober VOA’s centralized control. At risk, they say, is the VOA’s journalistic reputation.

“I’ve risked my life for this organization,” said one veteran VOA staffer. “I’m willing to do it for journalism, but I’ll be damned if I’ll do it for propaganda.”

VOA staffers are also up in arms over a suggestion that budget-cutters might close five overseas news bureaus, including Hong Kong, in order to pay for a new Sawa-style broadcast in Persian.

‘Let “Them” Know “Us” ’

Trenchant questions also come from both Western and Middle Eastern intellectuals who challenge what they see as the flawed underlying premise of U.S. overseas broadcasting: that to know America is to love America.

The United States’ most fundamental foreign policy problem, they argue, is precisely the perception that superpower America believes itself superior--and thus gives only lip service to the views of other nations.

“If the U.S. government will invest millions of dollars to let ‘us’ know ‘them,’ will it also strive to let ‘them’ know ‘us’?” the Cairo-based Al Ahram newspaper asked in its online edition. “We must stand up and postulate the outrageous assumption that in order for us to know the American people, appreciate their ideals and value system, they will have to know the same about us, the Arabs.”

Last month, the White House broadened its public diplomacy effort with a new Office of Global Communications to tell America’s story to the world. The goal is to counter misinformation, disinformation, hatemongering and anti-Americanism; to show that the U.S. is not anti-Muslim; to better explain U.S. policies; and to build global support for Washington’s declared war on terrorism.

Sawa, the brainchild of Los Angeles-based radio mogul Norman J. Pattiz, was launched with $35 million from Congress, and the Bush administration has requested an additional $21.7 million to expand in 2003.

Now Pattiz, chairman of the Middle East committee for the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which oversees the VOA, is working on a proposal for a U.S.-owned 24-hour Middle East satellite television network. He estimates that it would cost $160 million to compete with Al Jazeera, the Qatar-based satellite network that is hugely popular in the Middle East but notorious in the United States for broadcasting tapes of Osama bin Laden.

Skeptics wonder whether that money might be better spent promoting public health or cultural exchanges. Pattiz argues that unless the U.S. controls its medium, it will never be able to control the message.

Meanwhile, the radio station is gingerly going about proving its critics wrong. Its weapons are reams of research about the youth market, a reporting staff of former VOA Arabic service employees edited by experienced Arab American journalists, and top American radio management talent.

Sawa insists that it doesn’t do propaganda. But it doesn’t do stodgy, either.

“Sawa” means “together” in Arabic, and its music sends the message that the cultures of the West and the Arab world are not as estranged as might seem.

The 24-hour station uses the latest research techniques to decide which tunes to play and how often. Sawa is the only radio station broadcasting in Arabic in the Middle East that alternates between Arab and Western songs, said Bert Kleinman, a veteran radio programmer who fine-tunes Sawa’s format.

A Pleasing Mixture

The musical combination is not as unlikely as it might seem. While Western music is incorporating more Latin elements from the likes of Ricky Martin, Arab popular music is importing Western dance beats and Spanish and Greek influences, Kleinman said.

In fact, three-fourths of listeners in Sawa’s target age range, 17 to 28, told pollsters that they want to hear both Arab and Western music.

Only 2% of Arab listeners tuned in to the VOA, which was broadcast only on shortwave. But 42% of the 100 young fans of Arab and Western music polled in Amman in Sawa’s latest weekly survey said it is the station they listen to most.

More significant, the percentage of respondents who said Sawa is their first choice for news had shot up from 1% on July 1 to 18% by Aug. 12, while those listening to the BBC for news fell from 15% to 5%. That’s striking, because Jordan’s population is 60% Palestinian and deeply aggrieved by U.S. policy toward Israel.

Pattiz, who founded the Westwood One radio network, said he was “blown away” by the results.

Seven teenage girls sipping sodas at the Planet Hollywood in Amman last week did indeed swoon over Radio Sawa--but not for the news.

“I like that they put good English songs on and good Arabic songs,” 14-year-old Nafsika Skouti said. “But there is too much news. It’s boring. Maybe older people would like it.”

But the girls’ table fell silent when they were told that Sawa is sponsored by Uncle Sam-- although the station announces this clearly.

“I hate Bush,” declared Skouti’s sister Stephanie, 13.

“We should be telling the Americans what is happening here,” Nafsika said. “They don’t understand us.... They think they know us. I have nothing against Americans, I just don’t like the way they think.”

Mindful of such attitudes, Sawa is taking an indirect approach.

There are features on what’s new in film, computer and video games, and science. There’s “Sawa chat,” with the voices of young Arab men and women on the street weighing in on such questions as “Can women be good bosses?” “How do you know if the news media are telling the truth?” and that perennial teen theme, “Do you think your parents understand you?”

The idea is to promote thoughtful free expression without asking, “What do you think of American foreign policy?” Kleinman said.

Sawa gets about 150 e-mails a day from listeners across the Middle East.

Lately there have been messages from Iraq, where a separate broadcast with news and accents targeted to Iraqi listeners is being beamed in from Kuwait. So far, the fan mail has been positive, Kleinman said, as in the case of the Iraqi who e-mailed to say “it brought me a lot of joy.”

Sawa’s news staff is well aware that any U.S. program faces instant suspicion.

“The facts, only the facts, only the facts, the facts!” newscaster Husseini, a Moroccan-born journalist who worked for Al Jazeera “before they became so big,” insisted, jabbing his index finger aloft. “We are very aware not to be labeled a government mouthpiece. We earn our credibility.”

Sawa is bound by the VOA charter, which requires it to be “accurate, objective and comprehensive.” News director Harb, a Lebanese-born U.S. citizen who has worked at ABC’s “Nightline” program and the Saudi-owned Al Hayat newspaper, also expects his broadcasts to pass a sniff test for cultural sensitivity.

“We respect our listeners. We do not condescend,” he said. “These are the most sophisticated consumers in the world in terms of detecting propaganda.”

Speaking Carefully

Harb also polices the politically charged language of Middle East politics.

To the shock of some listeners, Sawa uses the Arabic words for “suicide bomber” instead of the religious term “martyr” or the word fedayeen, a secular term for someone who sacrifices himself for a cause, both commonly used in the Arabic media to describe Palestinian attacks on Israelis, Harb said.

“It’s a hugely emotional part of the world where a headline will make people take to the streets and get hurt,” the 35-year-old said. “We’re noninflammatory.”

But Harb has journalistic differences with his VOA counterpart over how the war on terrorism will be covered on U.S.-owned airwaves.

Last year, VOA news director Andre de Nesnera was accused of giving a platform to terrorists by airing sound bites from an interview with onetime Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar.

De Nesnera, a revered journalist, said he stands by the story and would air it again. Harb says he would not have aired tape of Omar--or, for that matter, of Saddam Hussein.

“Commercial-free does not mean mass murderers can have commercials on our airwaves,” he said. “The only news bite I will use for Saddam Hussein is when he says, ‘I am surrendering.’ ”

Times staff writer Michael Slackman in Amman contributed to this report.