U.S. Nightly News Shows to Make Their Iraqi Television Debut

Sometime this week, Iraqis with television reception will turn on their sets and see a parade of new faces delivering the evening news: Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings, Jim Lehrer and Brit Hume.

The news package -- which will include nightly programming produced by Arab journalists in Washington and the Middle East -- is part of an ambitious effort that White House officials say will show Iraq what a free press looks like in a democracy.

“Iraq and the World,” funded by the U.S. government, will feature nightly contributions from CBS, NBC, ABC, PBS and Fox News translated into Arabic, and is spearheaded by Norm Pattiz, the Los Angeles-based chairman of the Westwood One radio network. Pattiz said the new project marks “the first time that we have had a horse in the TV race” to compete with coverage from Qatar-based Al Jazeera, the Arabic-language satellite TV channel, and other media sources.

CNN declined to participate in the broadcasting program.

The introduction of U.S. evening news to Iraqis, who have lived with state-controlled media for decades, could be a revolutionary change for that culture, Pattiz said. But a host of critics suggest that the move may spark a backlash in a shellshocked society that is already deeply suspicious of American motives, and may be in no mood to trust the information or worldview conveyed by U.S. journalists.

“It might be a pretty huge cultural disconnect for Iraqis to turn on a TV and suddenly see Dan Rather,” said Mamoun Fandy, professor of politics and media at Georgetown University and a widely syndicated columnist in the Arab world. “Ideally, you should be encouraging Iraqis to produce their own nightly news, and if the U.S. is serious about communicating, they wouldn’t rush to put something like this on the air.”

Others credit the White House for trying to get an American message across as soon as possible, yet warn that “any media we broadcast which has the backing of our government will be suspect, because you can’t export democracy overnight,” said Nancy Snow, author of “Propaganda Inc.” and a professor at Cal State Fullerton.

The Iraqi people have learned to be deeply distrustful of many institutions, she added, “so why should they suddenly believe what they see on our nightly news?”

Pattiz is a member of the U.S. Broadcasting Board of Governors, an autonomous federal agency that also operates the Voice of America broadcasting service. He concedes that “Iraq and the World” faces big hurdles.

But he believes he will succeed, just as he did last year in launching Radio Sawa, a 24-hour U.S. government-sponsored radio station in the region that blends American and Arabic popular music with news broadcasts. The station has become a market phenomenon, reaching an estimated 40% of its target 18- to 39-year-old demographic, and the increasingly popular station is spawning French and British imitators, he said.

Pattiz now appears in many forums discussing the importance of U.S. media outreach to the Middle East. On Monday night, for example, he participated in a UC Irvine panel, “Addressing the Global Image of the United States,” sponsored by the Los Angeles-based Muslim Public Affairs Council.

“Our mission is a journalistic mission,” Pattiz told an audience of about 500 in the university’s Crystal Cove Auditorium. “We don’t do propaganda and we don’t do psychological operations.”

But over the long haul, America’s support of Israel will doom these efforts, countered panelist Pervez Amirali Hood- bhoy, a physics professor at Pakistan’s Quaid-e-Azam University who is visiting the United States on a lecture tour.

“America is seeking [to build an] empire, not just physical control, but also control over the hearts and minds of people over there,” he said. “But this won’t work.”

In an interview, Pattiz said White House officials asked him last week to get the new commercial-free project operating as soon as possible. He got quick approval from the heads of U.S. news divisions to beam their complete nightly broadcasts uncensored into Iraq via Commando Solo, a fleet of U.S. military cargo planes that fly over the country.

At first, the broadcasts will be limited to six-hour blocks “because that’s how long the plane can stay up,” Pattiz said. But ground transmitters are expected to be functioning within a matter of days, making 24-hour-a-day broadcasts possible, he added.

Currently, an estimated 10% of Iraq’s 24 million people have a television, “but that doesn’t mean only 10% is watching. It’s like television in America in the 1950s; one person on the block has a set, but others come around to watch,” Pattiz said.

As he works to get “Iraq and the World” off the ground, Pattiz is also marshaling an effort to create a government-backed news channel for the Middle East, which would compete with Al Jazeera and other 24-hour satellite broadcasts. Assuming that Congress appropriates the $30 million proposed for the regional television project, Pattiz said it could begin operations before the end of the year.

“In all my years, I have never had a challenge like this one in Iraq,” said Pattiz, 60, who created Westwood One after being fired from his job as sales manager at Los Angeles’ KCOP-TV in 1975. The concept came to him after he listened to a Motown radio special one weekend.

Today, Westwood One is the nation’s largest radio supplier of sports and music programming, talk and traffic information. Pattiz relinquished daily management of the company in 1994 to Infinity Broadcasting, which has become a part of Viacom Inc.

President Clinton appointed Pattiz to the broadcasting board in 2000. Pattiz came up with the idea for Radio Sawa after visiting the Middle East and learning that Voice of America, which could be heard only on a weak shortwave signal, had a 2% market share. President Bush reappointed him to another three-year term on the board.

Pattiz said the Arabic news component of “Iraq and the World” will be generated by journalists who are already producing segments for Radio Sawa, and are also preparing to launch the larger TV channel.

Although it is unclear whether U.S. nightly news will attract an audience in Iraq, some observers say the project must dramatically expand its focus. For example, as Fandy said, by training a new corps of Iraqi journalists who would produce news without interference.

Others say it is misleading to limit the broadcast to U.S. news programs.

“If we want to demonstrate the robustness of democracy, we should also be beaming in the BBC and half a dozen other sources of international news with this effort,” said Marty Kaplan, associate dean at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and director of the Norman Lear Center for the Study of Entertainment and Society. “Let’s show [Iraqis] that democracy involves this kind of glorious noise in which people disagree with each other all the time.”

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Times staff writer Zeke Minaya in Irvine contributed to this report.