Jamal Dajani
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 Jamal Dajani
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Jamal Dajani is an award winning producer and the Director of Middle Eastern Programming at Link TV. Born and raised in Jerusalem, Dajani completed his early studies at Collège des Frères, and attended Columbia University in New York City where he received a B.A. degree in Political Science. Since 2001, he has produced more than one-thousand installments of Mosaic: World News from the Middle East,[1] winner of the prestigious Peabody Award.1 In 2005, Dajani completed Occupied Minds, a documentary shedding light on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict & Who Speaks for Islam?, both aired on Link TV and PBS stations.
Dajani is a frequent guest on numerous national and international media broadcast networks and has published many articles on the Middle East in many print and electronic media outlets. He is the co-host of Arab Talk on KPOO radio, and serves on the board of New America Media,the largest collaboration of ethnic news organizations in the U.S. Dajani served for two years (2003-2004) as President of the Arab Cultural & Community Center of San Francisco. In 2005, Dajani was appointed by Mayor Gavin Newsom to the San Francisco Immigrant Rights Commission.
Profile
Local Visionary By Stephanie Marohn
Where do you get your news? Do you rely on only one or two TV networks or national newspapers to tell you what’s happening in the world? If so, you are not tapping into one of our most valuable natural resources: information. And unlike our other natural resources, the more you consume of this one, the better it is for the rest of the planet. The more information you have, the more responsible you can be as a global citizen. And like it or not, we are all global citizens now, living in a world where our actions can affect people in distant lands, whether it’s driving a vehicle that contributes to global warming or calling our congressional representatives to urge them to push for nuclear disarmament. How can we make educated decisions and act responsibly if we accept the version of reality presented by only one news source?
Shopping for News “People spend more time shopping for a shirt… than they do shopping for sources of news stories that can affect their lives,” observes Jamal Dajani, news analyst, documentarian, and director and award-winning producer of the half-hour program “Mosaic: World News from the Middle East”. The news program is broadcast on Link TV, an independent, noncommercial, satellite television network based in San Francisco and dedicated to airing news and views from around the globe. “Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately for me, I’m not that type of person. I’m a person who reads 10–12 newspapers and watches 30 different channels. People don’t have to be hooked like me—that’s my profession—but I say at least give it a chance and get several opinions about something from different sources. If something involves Iraq or the Middle East, I think you should pay attention to what is being done and said in Iraq and the Middle East as well as what is being done and said in the United States.”
Dajani, a Palestinian-American who was born in Jerusalem but has lived in the United States for the past three decades (most of that time in San Francisco), has spent many years studying the 22 countries of the Middle East and has visited 18 of them. With the understanding he has gained of both his adopted country and the Middle East, he considers himself a bridge between the two. Other people view him that way as well. Numerous national and international broadcast networks seek his expertise; he has been a guest on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, CNN Live, and Fox News with Brit Hume, among many others. And after 9/11, the Knight Foundation (a national foundation dedicated to improving journalism in the U.S. and worldwide) sought his help to answer the question many Americans were asking: “Why do they hate us?” The foundation realized that American sources of information about the Arab world were limited and if Americans were going to understand what was going on in the Middle East, they needed multiple perspectives from people in that part of the world. To this end, they hired Dajani to launch a Middle East news program. Originally, the plan was to broadcast Al Jazeera, the wellknown Arabic news channel, but Dajani wanted diverse perspectives. “Even though Al Jazeera is a great network, you don’t want to get your news from only one source,” he repeats, cautioning that every news outlet has its own agenda and bias, which is why consulting a variety is important. “You want to get as many resources and different stories and comparison analyses as you can, look at this one, compare it with that one, so at the end of the day, you’ll have a good picture of what happened in the past 24 hours.”
Recognizing that most people do not have the time to consult multiple news sources, Dajani designed Mosaic as a news digest or compilation, giving viewers a half-hour sample of world news as it is reported in the Middle East. He finds it interesting, to say the least, to see what Al Jazeera and Egyptian, Lebanese, and Israeli TV, for example, say about an event and then compare those reports to American coverage of the same event on Fox, CNN, or other news outlet. He thinks many Americans would also find this interesting. Judging by the success of Link TV and Mosaic, Dajani is right. Link TV now reaches one in four American homes, Dajani has produced more than 1,000 Mosaic installments, and, in 2004, Mosaic won a Peabody Award, which is the most prestigious broadcasting honor in the United States.
As for the answer to the question “Why do they hate us?” Dajani says that the question misses the point. “Most Americans didn’t realize that there is this pent-up anger and things people are upset about in the policies of the United States, justifiably or not.” The fact that most Americans didn’t realize this highlights how lacking many Americans are in knowledge about the people and history of the Middle East and other parts of the world. “We should at least know what’s going on,” says Dajani. “We are part of the world.”
Technology Bringing Us Together— and Apart The birth of satellite TV has brought us closer together in that we can now see and hear people in other countries speak about their lives. Dajani notes that with the more than 200 satellite networks in the Middle East, people now have the opportunity to express their opinion on the airwaves. He calls this “pluralism on the air,” to distinguish it from the lack of pluralism under repressive regimes in the region. “Through call-in shows, they can talk under a different name and describe the situation they’re living under, whether to criticize the monarch in their particular country or, for that matter, the U.S. government and Israel,” Dajani explains. “Now we can really know what people are saying, what they are thinking, their aspirations, the commonality between all the different countries, what moves them, what upsets them—that all comes to us from television.”
In his frequent trips to the region, Dajani has recently noticed a difference in the way Middle Easterners talk to him about the United States. “For years, people would say, ‘We don’t like their policies but we love America; it’s a great country, we love going there.’ Now, people are starting to feel that the policies represent the individual, the American citizen, and the citizens control the policies… Their translation of what America wants is basically hegemony, control. They refer to the United States as an empire, the American empire.” Dajani thinks it is very important for Americans to know that this is how we are viewed. Since the majority of Americans don’t travel to other countries, the only way to know this is to access sources of information that will let us know what is happening in other parts of the world.
Dajani is often invited to speak at broadcast journalism schools on U.S. campuses. He always asks the students, “How many of you have had the opportunity to watch Canadian TV? Or Mexican TV?” The lack of hands going up and the blank expressions that greet this question are in sharp contrast to European audiences who watch American TV as well as TV from multiple European countries. “We share a border with two other countries, and we have had a history with them since this country was formed,” says Dajani. “And yet your average American does not know what is going on in Quebec or in Toronto, unless, God forbid, there is a major disaster. I tell people that Americans learn their geography through wars. All of a sudden when you have a war, you open the New York Times, you open the Chronicle, and you see the place of the conflict, accompanied by a map, and they compare its size to Rhode Island or New Hampshire.” Dajani deplores this practice and blames our educational system for the fact that Americans cannot relate to these countries except in comparison to a U.S. state. “It is because we don’t study them,” he says. “I can’t tell you how many times I have watched TV here and heard statements by various congresspeople about countries they have never set foot in; they mispronounce their names, and they describe the Arab world as a monolith. I can tell they have no clue as to what is going on there. And that is very scary because they are in a powerful position to decide whether we are going to be engaged in a war or peace.”
Dajani speaks of the responsibility that comes with being a superpower, not only on the part of the government, but also on the part of every citizen. Beyond the responsibility that everyone in the world has for how their individual actions might affect others on the planet, citizens of the world’s only remaining superpower have an added responsibility because our country is in a position to have a huge impact on people everywhere. “With that responsibility, you have to increase your knowledge,” says Dajani.
Analyze the News for Yourself Access to information is one of the rights on which the United States was founded. “We set a model for the rest of the world—freedom of speech, the power of information, access to information for everyone—and this especially applies now, more than 200 years afterward, to a day when information travels through satellite, the airwaves, the Internet,” says Dajani. So how can we be sure that we are getting full access? First, as Dajani reminds people repeatedly, look to diverse sources instead of relying on only one or two (see sidebar). Second, question the source and follow the money. “That’s what I do in the Middle East,” Dajani notes. “I’m not saying that if you watch Arab TV, you should believe everything in it, because Arab TV has its own major problems. The vast majority of the Arab networks are either government controlled or financed by the Saudis. So that’s very important to know—who is backing a station and why is their opinion formulated in such a way?” Third, hear from both sides of a conflict or all the players in a news event. You are the judge, applying your critical thinking skills to determine the facts. “A judge’s role is to listen to the defendant and the plaintiff,” says Dajani, “You have to have two sides. And this is applied to everything in life.” Fortunately, people like Jamal Dajani are bringing us different perspectives, expanding our sources of information, and, in the process, helping us be better citizens of the world.
