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Revamping Social Security Experts Disagree on Severity of Shortfall's Consequences
By Jonathan WeismanWashington Post Staff WriterSunday, January 2, 2005; Page A08
In just 14 years, the nation's Social Security system is projected to reach a day of reckoning: Retiree benefits will exceed payroll tax receipts, and to pay its bills the system will have to begin redeeming billions of dollars in special Treasury bonds that have piled up in its trust fund. To redeem those bonds, which represent money taken in years when Social Security ran a surplus and used for other government operations, the federal government would likely have to cut other programs, raise taxes or borrow more money.
To President Bush, this is a crisis, worth nothing short of dramatic structural changes to a social insurance system that since 1940 has lifted the elderly and disabled from poverty. To those who wish to preserve the system, it is merely the day when Congress must own up to its past profligacy and begin repaying Social Security for the trillions of dollars it has borrowed to fund immediate tax cuts and spending.
How this debate is resolved could decide the fate of Bush's ambitious plan to revamp Social Security.
"In 2018, Social Security has a legal claim above and beyond the revenues it is collecting," said Charles Blahous, the White House's point person on Social Security. "The question is what is the most sensible policy going forward so costs and benefits are spread out as equitably as possible."
"Many times, legislative bodies will not react unless the crisis is . . . upon them," Bush warned Congress at a news conference late December. "I believe that crisis is [upon them]."
Peter R. Orszag, a Brookings Institution economist who heads the Pew Charitable Trusts' bipartisan Retirement Security Project, countered that there are less drastic ways to cover the cost of trust fund redemptions than Bush is contemplating. The White House could consider rolling back its tax cuts, the size of which, he said, dwarf Social Security's funding deficit. Over 75 years, the president's tax cuts will cost the Treasury $11 trillion, nearly triple Social Security's gap during that time.
"I do think they are trying to create an artificial sense of crisis," Orszag said.
Few economists or politicians question the demographic challenge to a system that supports 47.4 million Americans. A wave of Baby Boomers will begin drawing Social Security benefits as soon as 2008, putting unprecedented demands on the New Deal-era system that has become the nation's main retirement program. The ratio of workers to Social Security retirees has been declining steadily since the system began, and it is now down to three to one. It is expected to fall to two to one over the next three decades or so.
But there is considerable debate about how dire the problem is. For example, the scope of Social Security's "problem" may be as much as $10.4 trillion or as little as $3.7 trillion, depending on whether the analysis extends infinitely into the future, as the White House prefers, or extends to 75 years, the standard actuarial window.
Also, even by mid-century, when Social Security is likely to have depleted its trust fund of Treasury bonds, it would still be able to pay 73 percent of promised benefits out of the payroll taxes. Bush asserts the system will then be "bankrupt," but opponents question that terminology, since a 27 percent benefit cut would still leave the average payment above today's level, even after adjusting for inflation.
Blahous focuses his attention on the year 2018, when the Social Security payroll tax receipts will not cover benefit payments. "The government does have to come up with more money after 2018; that is the fiscal reality," he said.
By that time, spending on Social Security will have climbed steadily, from the current $492 billion, or 4.3 percent of the total economy, to nearly $1.3 trillion, or 5.3 percent of the economy, according to the Social Security trustees. To finance a bill of that magnitude would amount to a massive shift of wealth from younger generations to the elderly, those who want to revamp the system say.
To those resistant to dramatic changes in Social Security, redeeming the bonds shouldn't be the problem. "These 'IOUs' are Treasury bonds, one of the world's safest investments," said Robert Greenstein, executive director of the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. "The Treasury, the White House and Congress cannot choose not to pay interest on the bonds or not to redeem them -- unless they're willing to have the U.S. government default for the first time in history."
The problem, rather, is facing the whole government, not just Social Security. When payroll taxes were last raised, in 1983, Congress knew that new revenue would be used to reduce the budget deficit, not saved to fund future obligations. But when the time came to pay back Social Security, it was understood that the burden would be shared by taxpayers and the government at large, said Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, who dubbed Social Security "the phony crisis" in a 1999 book by that title.
"They deliberately raised the Social Security tax, an extremely regressive tax, to supposedly pre-fund Social Security," Baker said. "If Congress had said that money would be used to fund the government, then cut from Social Security when the time came to redeem those bonds, they would have been run out of town."
"Morally, this has to be seen as a burden that falls on the general government," Baker concluded.
"But," Blahous responded, "it's not much consolation to the worker of 2025 that there was an understanding in 1983 that he foot the bill."
Resolving whether and how to fund the debt owed to Social Security is critical. If the system is allowed to redeem all of its IOUs, it would remain healthy for decades to come. The trustees currently put the date of trust fund "exhaustion" at 2042.
But that date has proven extremely sensitive to economic conditions. In 1994, the Social Security trustees projected the system would run out of IOUs to redeem in 2029, 35 years into the future. But economic growth steadily pushed that date further out. By 2000, the date of exhaustion was 2037. By 2003, it was 2042.
And it could be even further than that. The Congressional Budget Office this summer projected the date of exhaustion to be 2052, a 10-year difference stemming from very small changes in economic assumptions. Many economists -- conservative and liberal -- say the economic future is considerably brighter still.
The trustees assume annual economic growth will slow to a crawl by 2015, and will remain at an anemic 1.8 percent through 2080. That is about half the growth rate the United States has averaged since the Civil War, said James Glassman, senior U.S. economist at J.P. Morgan Chase, who sees no reason why that would happen.
"There still are problems, but it's not the fiscal doomsday that people imagine," said Glassman, who delivered that sanguine outlook at a White House economic conference earlier this month.
Marc Summerlin, a former Bush White House economist, noted that under the current Social Security system, faster economic growth can delay the date of reckoning, but it cannot save the system. Initial Social Security benefits are set by taking workers' average salaries, then raising them by the rate of annual wage growth over their lifetimes. Faster economic growth may push back the day of reckoning, but it raises the size of benefits owed once the date is reached.
But growth does help. Once workers begin drawing Social Security benefits, those benefits rise annually with inflation. If the economy grows faster than the inflation rate, more taxes will flow in to support beneficiaries.
If benefits could be completely unlinked from economic growth -- for example, by setting initial benefit levels according to some combination of wage and price growth -- faster economic performance could go a long way toward saving the system with no other changes to the benefit structure, Orszag said.
Given all these uncertainties, it would be foolish to commit now to dramatic structural changes that may prove unnecessary, Baker argued. After all, lawmakers design and redesign the tax code, knowing full well that future Congresses will undue their work. The Medicare system, which faces far greater financial pressure than Social Security, was bulked up last year with a prescription drug benefit, with the understanding that lawmakers in the future would have to revisit the program. Why then, he asked, does the White House insist Congress in 2005 fix Social Security in perpetuity?
Blahous said such a question only underscores the problems of past congressional efforts.
"In the past, Social Security has been subject to a lot of temporary fixes, and if you make a fix that you know is temporary, by definition you are leaving a gap that some future generation is going to have to step forward to fill," he said. "We have to hold ourselves to a higher standard than a temporary fix this time."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A41423-2005Jan1?language=printer

Same-Sex Couples Receive Legal Boost Calif. Enhances Their Rights, Duties
By Lisa LeffAssociated PressSunday, January 2, 2005; Page A05
SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 1 -- Like many gay couples, Brian Cornell and Alberto Rulloda long ago established a legal framework for their relationship to match their commitment to each other. They drew up wills naming the other as beneficiary, property agreements and powers of attorney, among other documents. The couple of 27 years wanted to spell out the specifics that would have been presumed if they were married.
Starting Saturday, such improvised arrangements will be less necessary for them and nearly 29,000 other California couples -- the majority of them same-sex partners. A law taking effect with the new year gives gay couples who register as domestic partners nearly the same responsibilities and benefits as married spouses. Heterosexual elderly couples also are eligible.
Same-sex couples in California for the first time will have access to divorce court for dividing their assets, seeking alimony and securing child support. They also will have automatic parental status over children born during the relationship and responsibility for each other's debts.
It guarantees domestic partners a say over what happens to their loved one's remains at death and means they cannot be forced to testify against each other in state courts.
"It won't be as good as marriage because we are talking about a thousand-plus federal benefits that won't be covered," Cornell said. "But a start's a start, progress is progress."
Many gay rights advocates say the domestic partner law heralds a new era of legal recognition and participation for gay men and lesbians. They hope that is particularly true for those raising children or without the money to pay lawyers to prepare the previously recommended paperwork.
One indication of the growing acceptance comes from the California Department of Health Services, which is updating its birth certificates to replace the lines for "mother" and "father" with the gender-neutral "parent" and "parent." Until now, hospitals have altered the forms by hand, and couples have needed a court order for the changes to be approved.
Two groups opposed to marriage rights for same-sex couples have challenged the law, saying it violates the intent of a 2000 ballot initiative approved by voters that holds only unions between a man and a woman are valid in the state. The California Court of Appeal has agreed to hear the case early in the year.
"Whether you call it 'domestic partnerships' or 'civil unions,' homosexual 'marriage' by another name is still homosexual 'marriage,' and the people of California voted against that," said Randy Thomasson, executive director of Campaign for California Families, one of the groups that brought the lawsuit.
Linton Johnson, 31, and Jeff Winkler, 30, already share a bank account, ownership interests in two houses and a romance that goes back six years. The extra responsibilities of domestic partnership, such as obligation for each other's debts, are not a burden for the Oakland residents.
"It helps legitimize our relationship to others," Johnson said. "And in that regard, if you get treated differently, you sort of feel like family with the rest of the world, and that can bring you closer together."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A41302-2005Jan1.html?referrer=email
Finding a Home for Old Computers
By Mike MusgroveWashington Post Staff WriterSunday, January 2, 2005; Page F09
If getting rid of clutter happens to be one of your New Year's resolutions, nothing will clear up a few cubic feet of space like getting an old computer, monitor or printer out the door.
In most cases, selling that antique hardware to a friend, co-worker or eBay user won't be an option -- computers lose their value faster than almost any other manufactured product in history. Just tossing them in the trash isn't a good idea either: Most computing gear contains such toxic components as lead, mercury and cadmium.
Instead, your options probably fall into the same two categories as a lot of other household junk: recycling or disposal.
The simplest choice is one of the computer-recycling programs that many PC vendors run. Gateway (www.gateway.tradeups.com), Hewlett-Packard (www.hp.com/recycle) and Dell (www.dell.com/recycle) all accept defunct computers regardless of brand. Just fill out an online form, pay a processing fee (usually $15 to $35) and pack up the old equipment. A shipper will show up at your door a few days later to whisk it away. In some cases, you can get a rebate toward the purchase of a new machine.
Equipment taken in through such recycling programs will be shipped to facilities built for breaking computers back down to their basic elements. Plastic, glass, steel, aluminum, copper, gold and silver -- all found inside desktops and laptops -- can be recovered and reused; the toxic leftovers will be safely disposed of.
This tear-down process has become a major industry. HP's recycling centers, for example, process 6.5 million pounds of dead computing a month.
Dell and HP also have partnerships with the National Cristina Foundation (www.cristina.org), which channels used equipment to people with disabilities and at-risk students. The Greenwich, Conn.-based foundation accepts only PCs with Pentium II-era or newer processors (or G3 or newer on the Mac side). Laptops must have displays measuring at least 13 inches diagonally. And any software loaded on a machine must come with some proof of purchase, such as the original CDs.
Broken hardware, however, may not be a problem for the foundation -- provided it can find a recipient or partner organization able to repair it, which the foundation can take two weeks to determine. NCF or one of its partners will then arrange for the removal of the donated equipment, or donors can drop it off at a designated location or ship it to a specified site.
Yet another disposal option for obsolete or deceased hardware is the electronics-recycling events that many local jurisdictions stage once or twice a year. Consult your city or county's Web site for details on any such programs.
Donating an old PC directly to a charity can seem a more generous act. But you want to make sure it still can handle mainstream tasks, lest you only hand off a computer-disposal problem.
Two local computer-user groups, the Capital PC User Group and Washington Apple Pi, have run their own recycling operations for many years, sending aged equipment to needy schools, charities and students.
The Capital PC User Group accepts donations of old equipment at its downtown Rockville office. No fee applies; details are available at the group's Web site (www.cpcug.net/reboot.asp).
Washington Apple Pi accepts Mac desktops or laptops running G3 or newer processors. No fee applies, but the group asks donors to contact it first, so that it can verify that the machine can find a welcoming home. See www.wap.org/about/donations.html for details.
Some charities don't accept computer donations at all, since they have found that they've gotten stuck with the bill for disposing of computer equipment that can't be put to any use. The local Salvation Army (www.salvationarmydcmetro.org), however, will accept old equipment of any vintage, which it will either sell in its thrift stores or use in after-school computer labs.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A40339-2005Jan1?language=printer

The Year in Death
Sunday, January 2, 2005; Page B06
ONLY A FEW years ago, in 1999, Americans saw 98 people put to death -- a modern record following two decades of steady increases. Since then, however, there has been a precipitous decline in capital punishment. Two years after its peak, the number of executions had fallen to 66, according to data from the Death Penalty Information Center. And after blipping marginally back up for a year, it fell again -- from 71 executions in 2002 to 65 executions in 2003 and down to 59 executions this past year. This is a 40 percent drop from the 1999 figure. What's more, new death sentences have fallen by more than 50 percent since the mid-1990s, and death row is gradually shrinking. Public support for capital punishment has also decreased.
The distribution of executions this year is no surprise. Texas as usual has the dubious honor of leading the nation in death -- by a country mile. The Lone Star State killed 23 people, more than three times the seven executions that second-place Ohio carried out. The regional concentration of executions, which has become particularly dramatic in recent years, continued in 2004. Only 12 of the 38 states that permit the death penalty actually conducted executions last year, and just three of those -- Ohio, Nevada and Maryland -- were outside the South. The top six death-penalty states this past year -- Texas, Ohio, Oklahoma (which executed six), Virginia (five), North Carolina (four) and South Carolina (four) -- accounted for 83 percent of the country's executions. Capital punishment, in short, is not merely becoming rarer; it is significantly more geographically isolated than during the 1990s.
These trends are promising, because they reflect growing public concerns over the death penalty. And that concern is crucial to ultimately abolishing it. The political will to abolish the death penalty does not exist. But the fewer states that actually carry out executions regularly, the easier it becomes to demonstrate that capital punishment is an unnecessary and reckless gambit that accomplishes nothing at great moral and financial cost and always carries some risk of an irreversible catastrophe.
That risk is not trivial. The advent of DNA testing has spurred a rash of death row exonerations over the past several years -- exonerations that have driven the reform movement. Only last month the Chicago Tribune reported on its remarkable investigation of the case of Cameron Todd Willingham, who was executed in Texas in February. The Tribune reported that the case against him for killing his children by burning down his home was "based primarily on arson theories that have since been repudiated by scientific advances"; the fire may well have been accidental and Mr. Willingham innocent. The truth is that nobody can say with confidence that all of the 944 people executed in the United States in the modern era of capital punishment were guilty. The laws of probability, rather, strongly suggest otherwise.
Capital punishment in this country is not going to be abolished overnight. And it is surely premature to venture the prediction that the past five years are the beginning of its final decay. It is not, however, too soon to venture that hope.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A41559-2005Jan1?language=printer

January 2, 2005
Rebels With a Cause, and a Business Plan
By WILLIAM C. TAYLOR

T times, Arkadi Kuhlmann can sound a lot like Eliot Spitzer or Suze Orman. He rails against the banking industry's high fees. He bemoans a financial culture that encourages people to save too little, consume too much and invest too recklessly.
But Mr. Kuhlmann is neither a government enforcer nor a high-profile financial planner. He is the chief executive of one of the fastest-growing retail banks in the country. His operation, ING Direct USA, opened for business in September 2000 and has attracted some two million customers and nearly $30 billion of assets. In the first half of 2004, with 1,000 employees, the bank, a unit of the Dutch bank ING Groep, generated pretax profits of $112 million.
Mr. Kuhlmann and a few other businesses, like Craigslist, the online bulletin board, have adopted strategic advocacy as their business model. Companies that embrace this philosophy don't just try to avoid the wrath of reformers. They aim to fly the flag of change themselves by questioning the standard industry operating procedures. They try to stand out from the crowd by standing for an alternative to business as usual.
In the case of ING Direct, Mr. Kuhlmann and his colleagues say that they aren't just building a bank. They are challenging and trying to change the common and what they call the misguided practices of an entire industry. "We looked around and said, 'The banking business is bust,' " Mr. Kuhlmann said. "The consumer always loses. Then we said, 'How can we do something radically different?' "
The approach is not without precedent, of course. For decades, Southwest Airlines has defied the industry's standard approaches to economics and customer service, and has achieved good results. HBO has become the most powerful creative force in television - and a financial juggernaut - by becoming a force for originality in an industry defined by mimicry. But with so much competition in the market, and so much mistrust in the air, a new generation of companies is embracing and extending the advocacy strategy.
"I love our advocacy position," Mr. Kuhlmann said. "It differentiates us. Most companies, especially in an industry like banking, are truly boring. If you do things the way everybody else does, why do you think you're going to be any better?"
ING Direct USA, based in Wilmington, Del., will never be confused with Citibank or Bank of America. It is a direct-to-the-customer operation, an Internet-based savings bank - although customers can also bank by mail or phone. There are no branches, no A.T.M.'s. There are also no fees, no minimum deposits and a limited number of product offerings: savings accounts, a few certificates of deposit, a handful of mutual funds.
The simplicity of the model means that ING Direct's costs are very low: in some parts of the business, they are one-sixth the cost at a conventional bank. Low costs mean that ING Direct can offer relatively high interest rates on deposits, with its basic passbook savings account, at 2.35 percent, offering four times the industry average. But the bank's core message isn't about its business model. It's about "leading Americans back to savings" - championing the virtues of thrift in an age when most financial services conglomerates, Mr. Kuhlmann argues, lead their customers into financial temptation.
"One way or another, most financial companies are telling you to spend more," he said. "We're showing you how to save more. What's better than apple pie, the little guy, fighting for the underdog? We want to own that space."
For ING Direct, the first order of business is introducing products that make it easy and financially rewarding for customers to save. But a big part of its strategy is choosing the products it won't offer. For example, it doesn't issue credit cards, or market auto loans, or even provide checking accounts. Those services encourage customers to spend, and are contrary to the focus on saving. "Rich Americans are used to platinum cards, special service," he said. "We treat everybody the same."
ING Direct even rejects customers whom it considers out of sync with its message. The company "fired" more than 3,500 customers last year - customers who, in one way or another, didn't play by the bank's rules. These were people who, for example, made too many calls to customer service or asked the bank too often to make exceptions from its standard operating procedures.
Another company that has staked out a contrarian position through the use of customer advocacy is Craigslist, the online bulletin board that has become a darling of the Internet sector. Jim Buckmaster, the chief executive of Craigslist, is soft-spoken, reserved, minimalist in his rhetoric and demeanor. But his personality is a perfect fit for his company, which aims to provide a no-frills "public service" in an industry filled with overblown claims and intrusive marketing.
"I don't want to bad-mouth corporations," he says. "We're a corporation. But there's room for a lot more diversity in the approach companies take. We're trying to stake out one modest example for corporate America, for people to see if it's applicable to what they do."
Craigslist, based in San Francisco, has attracted acclaim through what Mr. Buckmaster calls its "nerd values." There is no talk of monetizing eyeballs, maximizing click-throughs or building a backlog of banner ads. Users swap messages, sell goods and services, search for apartments and look for jobs on a bare-bones site that charges no monthly fees, accepts no advertising and uses virtually no graphics.
Craigslist has a simple, unadorned Web site. But that is part of a forward-looking business strategy. Mr. Buckmaster said he reveled in what he called "the ironies of unbranding, demonetizing and noncompeting." Together, they represent sharp departures from the commercialism on so much of the Web.
Craigslist has an unconventional approach to investing in its "brand": it doesn't do anything. "We never even use that word internally," Mr. Buckmaster said. "We do zero advertising. We don't have a logo. Now we're told we have the strongest brand ever for a company our size."
The company also has a fresh approach to competition: it doesn't compete. "We have no interest in competing with anyone," Mr. Buckmaster said. "We're just trying to create something as useful as possible. Yet we keep reading that we're one of the newspaper industry's deadliest competitors" for classified ads.
Above all, Craigslist has a distinctive approach to economics: it keeps finding reasons not to charge customers. It imposes modest fees on companies that post job listings in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York, and there is talk of charging real estate agents to list apartments in New York. Other than that, the site is free. Yet the company has generated healthy profits on revenue approaching $10 million a year, and eBay recently bought a minority stake.
THAT is the ultimate contradiction of Craigslist, and the power of advocacy as a strategy. Craigslist's authentically anticommercial values have led to a flourishing commercial property - a company with Web sites in 65 cities, sites that add three million new classified ads a month and get more than a billion page views a month. People involved in several proposed deals said that Craigslist, with just 14 employees, might fetch as much as $100 million if it were put up for sale.
"We're definitely oddballs in the Internet industry, and we always have been," Mr. Buckmaster said. "Lots of people made fun of us, especially at the height of the dot-com boom. Most of those people are out of business now."
William C. Taylor, a co-founder of Fast Company magazine, is writing a book called "Mavericks at Work." He lives in Wellesley, Mass.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/02/business/yourmoney/02advo.html?th=&adxnnl=1&oref=login&adxnnlx=1104698576-yds8ddxIktcc+pAGV1lvfg&pagewanted=print&position=


January 2, 2005
The War Inside the Arab Newsroom
By SAMANTHA M. SHAPIRO

bdul Rahman Al-Rashed, the general manager of Al Arabiya, a 24-hour satellite-news channel broadcasting from Dubai, has six plasma-screen TV's in his office on the floor of the channel's glowing, ultramodern newsroom set. They are always on. One is tuned to Al Arabiya itself, and depending on where the cameras are placed, Al-Rashed sometimes catches a glimpse of himself, pacing around his desk on his cellphone. Another shows Al Jazeera, the channel's main competition. A third is tuned to a new Saudi government satellite channel, and a fourth displays CNN. Al-Rashed likes to flip around on the other two -- from Al Hurra, the widely ignored news channel that the United States government started last February, to the BBC and then to Al Manar, the Hezbollah-owned station that was banned by the French and American governments last month for broadcasting anti-Semitic slanders and what a State Department spokesman called ''incitement to violence.''
Al-Rashed's job is to find a place for Al Arabiya within this array, preferably at the top of the ratings. For now, though, it is Al Jazeera, which was started in 1996 by the emir of the gulf state of Qatar, that sets the standard, and the tone, for Arab television news. According to a poll conducted last May by Zogby International and the University of Maryland, Al Jazeera is the first choice for 62 percent of satellite-news viewers in Jordan, 66 percent in Egypt and 44 percent in Saudi Arabia. In most countries in the poll, Al Arabiya came in a distant second, although the professor who designed the poll, Shibley Telhami, said it had captured a ''remarkable'' market share for a satellite channel that, at the time, had been on the air for only a year; 39 percent of satellite-news viewers said they watched Al Arabiya almost daily. And in Saudi Arabia, the biggest advertising market in the region, the ratings race is much closer.
Sheik Walid al-Ibrahim, a Saudi, is the owner of both Al Arabiya and its parent network, the Middle East Broadcasting Center, or MBC, the flagship station of which, a ''family entertainment'' channel called MBC 1, has more viewers than any other channel in the Middle East. Sheik Walid started Al Arabiya in February 2003 to provide a more moderate alternative to Al Jazeera. His goal, as he told me last month, was to position Al Arabiya as the CNN to Al Jazeera's Fox News, as a calm, cool, professional media outlet that would be known for objective reporting rather than for shouted opinions. He said he thought the market was ready for an alternative. ''After the events of Sept. 11, Afghanistan and Iraq, people want the truth,'' he said. ''They don't want their news from the Pentagon or from Al Jazeera.''
Sheik Walid's personal political interests may also be a motivating factor. He is the brother-in-law of King Fahd of Saudi Arabia; the Saudi royal family dislikes Al Jazeera because it gives air time to Al Qaeda, and one of Al Qaeda's most cherished goals is the overthrow of the Saudi government. And before Al Jazeera, Saudi businessmen owned almost all of the major pan-Arab media, including MBC, the only channel that broadcast news bulletins to the whole of the Middle East, so the country and its rulers were rarely scrutinized by Arab journalists. Qatar's emir allowed Al Jazeera's reporters to take on the Saudis, as well as other governments in the Middle East.
Al Arabiya's sophisticated production values set it apart from other Arab news channels. Its sets and graphics have a clean, high-tech look, and its news bulletins are fast-paced -- no item lasts longer than two and a half minutes -- and are introduced with a dramatic drumbeat. While Al Jazeera anchors sit at a desk in front of a drab two-dimensional backdrop that looks a little like a local American news set from the 1970's, Al Arabiya's news is broadcast from the floor of its futuristic in-the-round silver-and-glass newsroom.
From its inception, Al Arabiya had a different style than Al Jazeera. There was nothing on Al Arabiya quite like Al Jazeera's signature programs, ''Islamic Law and Life,'' which offers advice to viewers on how to apply Sharia to their lives, and ''The Opposite Direction,'' which features fierce head-to-head debates. But what was reported and broadcast on Al Arabiya in its first months was, at times, similar to what you could see and hear on Al Jazeera. The two stations competed to show the most provocative, gory footage of casualties from Iraq. And after American troops captured Baghdad, Al Arabiya reported, incorrectly, that American forces had carried off all the treasures in the national museum.
American military authorities in Iraq and the American-appointed Iraqi Governing Council certainly didn't seem to distinguish between the two satellite channels: they considered both to be allied with the enemy. In September 2003, the Governing Council suspended Al Arabiya from reporting on official government activities for two weeks because, the council maintained, the channel was supporting resistance attacks. And that November, the council ordered Al Arabiya to stop all of its Iraqi operations after the channel broadcast a taped message from Saddam Hussein in hiding. At a news conference that month, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld called Al Arabiya ''violently anticoalition'' and in a separate interview said, ''There are so many things that are untrue that are being reported by irresponsible journalists and irresponsible television stations, particularly like Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya, that are leaving the Iraqi people with a totally imbalanced picture of what is happening in their country.''
When Sheik Walid heard in early 2004 that Al-Rashed had just stepped down as editor of Asharq Al Awsat, a prominent Arab-language daily published in London, he began trying to persuade him to come to Dubai. Al-Rashed, an American-educated Saudi, is well known for his often angry and outspoken columns criticizing Islamic fundamentalism, and especially for a particularly scathing column that he wrote after Chechen rebels seized a school in North Ossetia in September, a siege that ended in more than 300 deaths. ''It is a certain fact that not all Muslims are terrorists, but it is equally certain, and exceptionally painful, that almost all terrorists are Muslims,'' he wrote. ''What a pathetic record. . . . We cannot tolerate in our midst those who abduct journalists, murder civilians, explode buses; we cannot accept them as related to us, whatever the sufferings they claim to justify their criminal deeds. These are the people who have smeared Islam and stained its image.''
Beyond Al-Rashed's criticism of Islamic fundamentalists, the main target of his wrath is the Arab media. He didn't want to speak on the record about Al Jazeera, but during the three weeks I recently spent with the station's management and staff, he made it clear that he thinks his competition is not just misguided but actively dangerous. ''The region is being filled with inaccuracies and partial truths,'' he told me. (Like everyone I met at the station, he spoke English with me and Arabic with his co-workers.) ''I think people will always make good judgments if they have the right information and the whole information. What we lack right now is the truth and information. After that, we'll have a sane society. Right now it is an insane society because of the way information is being delivered to individuals.''
When Al-Rashed arrived at Al Arabiya, he replaced the news director and hired a new executive editor. The three men share a vision for the station that involves less gore and a wider definition of what is news and what should captivate the interest and emotions of their viewers. The new leadership triumvirate is interested in reporting stories about honor killings and violence against women in Arab countries, a widespread phenomenon rarely considered newsworthy by other Arab media outlets. Al-Rashed and his top editors also push for lighter stories about daily life -- the kind of apolitical features that fill much of the programming day on Western news channels.
On directions from Al-Rashed, Al Arabiya anchors and correspondents now refer to American troops in Iraq as ''multinational forces,'' not ''occupying forces.'' He told the producer of ''The Fourth Estate,'' a program that serves as a roundup of Western media, to stop quoting from The Guardian and The Independent, two left-leaning British papers whose content used to provide much of the show's material. One Al Arabiya host told me that she had been instructed to cut off guests who digress into anti-American rants, and other hosts I spoke to said they were being encouraged to ask tougher questions in their interviews.
To Al-Rashed, the challenge he faces is much bigger than simply revamping a television channel. His goal is to foster a new kind of dialogue among Arabs, to carve out space for moderate and liberal ideas to enter the conversation, and in the process to do nothing less than save the Arab world from itself. ''People become radicals because extremism is celebrated on TV,'' he told me. ''If you broadcast an extremist message at a mosque, it reaches 50 people. But do you know how many people can be sold by a message on TV?''
Al-Rashed, 49, had never worked full time in television before coming to Dubai. But he knows that television is the medium that is remaking the Middle East, for bad or good. ''I am sitting on a nuclear reactor,'' he said, speaking of Al Arabiya. ''It could produce electricity and light up a city, or it could cause destruction. It's up to the person sitting in the chair where I am sitting to decide which way it will go.''
For most of the short history of the Arab media, television stations have been run by national governments, who used them as extensions of their information ministries. Satellite TV changed that dynamic by allowing Arab journalists to go offshore -- initially mostly to London -- and beam Arab news into the Arab world without fear of being arrested or shut down. MBC was the first network to do so, but after 11 years in London, it was lured in 2002 to Dubai, the glimmering hub of capitalism and tourism in the United Arab Emirates. Dubai is a city under construction, 24 hours a day, and what is being built often seems like a caricature of Western excess: an archipelago of man-made islands shaped like the continents; the tallest skyscraper in the world; and, still on the drawing board, the largest mall in the world, replete with an indoor ski slope, and an underwater hotel. As part of the development of Dubai, the emirate established ''free zones'' -- tax-free areas with financial incentives to lure businesses into clustered luxury office parks. The Al Arabiya offices are in the flagship building of Media City, facing a man-made lake with unnaturally even waves, not far from Internet City, Health Care City and Knowledge Village.
The chance to be in the Arab world but still removed from the economic and political problems that plague many of its countries proved attractive to MBC and to a number of other media outlets. It also appealed to Al-Rashed. The second of 14 children born to two wives in a middle-class Saudi family, Al-Rashed hadn't lived in the region since he left Riyadh in his 20's to attend American University in Washington. The seven years that he spent in the United States were eye-opening: he watched the Iranian revolution through the prism of the American media and covered events in the early 1980's from Washington for Al Majalla, a Saudi-owned London-based magazine. Al-Rashed moved to London in 1985 and rose through the ranks of elite Saudi-owned magazines and newspapers. He never thought he would return to the Middle East. Dubai, he said, is the only place in the Arab world he can ''exist.'' He sees Dubai as an experiment that could spur reform in other Arab countries and show what can be accomplished with a little openness and less corruption.
The population of Dubai is only 18 percent native; the rest of the residents are Western and Arab expatriates and laborers, mainly from India, Pakistan and East Asia who live in camps of squat cinder-block housing and ride back and forth to their work sites in company buses. Young single journalists at Al Arabiya go out to places like the cafe at the Dubai marina, where they can smoke water pipes next to a fountain designed to mimic the sounds of the ocean. In self-consciously ''Arabian''-style restaurants and nightclubs, Al Arabiya employees find themselves in combinations that would be unlikely in their home countries: one night atop the Royal Mirage rooftop bar, I sat sipping cosmopolitans with a Sunni, a Shiite and a Maronite Christian, all from Lebanon. With its Disneyesque Arab souks in which you can purchase Arab handicrafts or a Cinnabon, Dubai seemed like an elaborate stage set for modernization in the Arab world, a shallow facade of empty skyscrapers with -- so far -- nothing but sand behind them.
Al-Rashed has been in Dubai for nine months, and he misses his house in the Kensington neighborhood in London, where he lived alone and where most of his possessions remain. He occupies an apartment suite in a downtown hotel, but he has barely set foot in the kitchen, and the bedroom serves as little more than a warehouse for half-unpacked suitcases and dress shirts still in their boxes. I met him at his place one morning in December, and we rode the elevator down to a cafe in the lobby for breakfast. He beamed politely at our waitress, Almira, a petite Indonesian woman in a lavender fez-like hat and apron whose name tag read ''Amy.'' ''I missed you,'' he told her, his dimples flashing. ''You were gone so long over Ramadan.''
Halfway through his croissant and latte, his cellphone beeped with a text message from the news director at Al Arabiya: ''Wael Essam is arrested by Americans.'' Wael Essam, or Wild Wael, as Al-Rashed likes to call him, is Al Arabiya's correspondent in Falluja. He is only 27, and he has something of a reputation as a renegade. He was the only reporter who was able to get into Falluja at the beginning of the American offensive in November without being embedded with the United States military. From inside Falluja, he delivered breathless reports on Al Arabiya, his brow furrowed with intensity, his camera spinning from plumes of smoke billowing over the city to black-hooded fighters gathered in a lantern-lighted room. In a report I saw, the insurgents spoke calmly, not in the formal, didactic style of the kidnappers on beheading tapes; they were obviously relaxed around Essam, even when they were telling him that they were registered to commit ''martyr operations.''
Essam was born in Qatar, to Palestinian parents. He attended Baghdad University, where he was president first of the Palestinian student group and then of the Arab students' union. He started working for Al Arabiya in 2003 as a reporter. Partly because of his student-government position, Essam had connections to families in Falluja and to former members of Saddam Hussein's Baathist government, and last April he began pestering his editors to let him report from Falluja. Salah Negm, who was the news director before Al-Rashed arrived, refused to give Essam the assignment, saying it was too dangerous. So last April, Essam used his vacation time to travel to Iraq from Dubai and ''embed'' himself in a house of insurgents in Falluja.
Essam spent the summer back in Dubai, working in the newsroom. In the fall, when the American military authorities in Iraq announced plans to retake Falluja, Essam knew he wanted to return there. He couldn't bear to be in the office any longer, he told me. ''I hate it too much,'' he said. ''You just stay in your chair just taking news from wires.'' Al-Rashed was hesitant about sending Essam to Falluja, because, he said, Essam is ''hot-blooded.'' When Essam threatened to use his vacation time to go back, Al-Rashed relented.
Overall, Al-Rashed has been happy with Essam's reports from Iraq. The Al Arabiya Web site featured them prominently, detailing Essam's journey through Falluja, from his close calls with insurgents and American marines to the ''large predatory mosquitoes'' he encountered just outside the city. Al-Rashed knew it was a great coup to have a reporter behind the lines in Falluja -- American and British television journalists couldn't safely report from there, and in August Al Jazeera was banned from Iraq altogether by the government of Ayad Allawi.
Al-Rashed, finishing his croissant, did not seem particularly fazed by the text message about Essam's capture. If Essam was in American custody, Al-Rashed reasoned, he was less likely to be shot or blown up. ''The chance that he was going to be killed was a lot higher than that he would be arrested,'' he said. ''If the Americans have him with two legs and two arms, that's good news.'' (He was right to be sanguine, as it turned out; Essam was released a few hours later.)
American troops have killed three Al Arabiya employees in Iraq. Ali al-Khatib, a reporter for the channel, and Ali Abdul Aziz, a cameraman, were killed last March by American gunfire near the site of a rocket attack on a Baghdad hotel. Mazen Al-Tumeizi was killed by a missile fired from an American helicopter in September while he was reporting live on a crowd celebrating in the streets of Baghdad after an attack that destroyed a Bradley fighting vehicle.
Even more Al Arabiya employees in Iraq have been killed by insurgents. In late October, a suicide bomber detonated a car bomb outside the Al Arabiya compound in the Al Mansour neighborhood in Baghdad, killing five, wounding dozens and destroying the channel's Baghdad office. Al Arabiya, like many Arab news stations, received threats from Islamist groups, by e-mail and posted on Web sites, in the preceding months. A group called the Jihadist Martyrs Brigades took credit for the attack. In its dispatches, members had criticized Al Arabiya for giving the new Iraqi government overly favorable coverage. They called Al Arabiya a ''terrorist channel'' and suggested that its name, which means ''the Arab,'' should be changed to ''the Hebrew.''
After the attack, Al-Rashed's first directive to his Baghdad staff was to get on the air. Within minutes, he was on the phone to his roving anchor in Baghdad, Najwa Kassem, a serious, high-cheekboned veteran of five wars. It was important to send the terrorists a message, Al-Rashed told her, that they had failed to drive the channel out of Iraq or off the air. Kassem was in the compound during the attack, and she had been thrown onto some broken glass by the explosion. She was still helping wounded co-workers when Al-Rashed got her on the phone. After she spoke to him, she began reporting live by telephone from the blast site, and as soon as the channel's video feed was fixed, she was on the air, saying in a shaky voice that the bodies of her colleagues were too torn apart to identify. The list of the dead, she said, was being determined by who was missing.
I watched the tape in the Al Arabiya office, and it is powerful footage. Kassem's face looked strangely naked -- it had seemed inappropriate to wear makeup for the broadcast, she told me last month -- and she spoke urgently, affecting none of the rhythmic speech and eyebrow-lifting of a typical rehearsed report.
In the days following the report, Al-Rashed said, a group called the Baath Party Arab Congress began to post reports on its Web site threatening Kassem by name. One, issued on Nov. 13, charged Kassem with being the ''organizational point-person'' responsible for ''the dissemination and perpetuation of falsehoods against the resistance'' and labeled her ''the prime-mover of such a policy at the present time.'' After Al-Rashed read the statements and other warnings, he reversed his earlier instructions to Kassem. Without saying why, he told her she would be fired if she didn't go to Beirut immediately. It was only after she had arrived that he told her her life had been threatened.
Many employees in Al Arabiya's newsroom have intimate connections with the conflicts they cover, and not all of them agree with all of Al-Rashed's ideas. There are Sudanese Arabs, Palestinians who grew up in Syrian refugee camps and a reporter who had been a member of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party. There are also several former Al Jazeera employees. Some were poached for their expertise; others defected because, they said, Al Jazeera's management these days is too Islamist for them. Women were discouraged from wearing tight pants, they said, and some men refused to shake your hand if they knew you didn't follow Islamic law.
The job of overseeing a staff of reporters that comes from so many places, geographically and politically, falls to a man named Nabil Khatib. Al-Rashed didn't hire Khatib directly. He hired Khatib's boss, Nahkle El Hage, a former executive at MBC who is now the news director at Al Arabiya, and the first thing El Hage did in his new position was hire Khatib. El Hage knew Khatib from the 12 years Khatib spent as MBC's bureau chief for the Palestinian territories and Israel. El Hage was impressed by what he saw as Khatib's sense of fairness, even when it caused trouble for MBC. ''I took a lot of heat for his coverage,'' El Hage said. ''At seminars and parties, people would ask: 'How can you be neutral on Palestine? Why don't you say martyr?''' -- meaning that Khatib should have been using the word ''shahid,'' or martyr, to describe Palestinian suicide bombers. ''I was glad we didn't,'' El Hage went on. ''Nabil was the most evenhanded reporter in the region.''
Khatib's desk is just outside Al-Rashed's office. There is a constant rhythm going on all around him -- urgent bleeps from the wire services, the ring of his office phone and the warble of his cellphone. He answers most calls with the same deep-voiced greeting, ''habibi,'' which means sweetheart, an endearment that he also finds the opportunity to murmur to a surprising number of co-workers.
Khatib has a 5 o'clock shadow, and dark bags draw his big, bloodshot eyes downward. His head and shoulders seem permanently rounded forward, even when he is not staring at his computer monitor. A pack of Dunhill Lights usually sits by his keyboard. Khatib is a big man, but he used to be even bigger, and these days his clothes bunch baggily at his waist. In the four months he has worked at Al Arabiya, Khatib has lost 36 pounds. One evening he complained to me that he had not seen his baby daughter in two weeks, because she is asleep when he arrives home at night, and she is still asleep when he leaves in the morning. Woefully, he described the time he made his wife meet him at a nearby mall for lunch so he could see her and his daughter. ''I had only time for coffee and to kiss her,'' he said. ''Calls came in the entire time.''
Khatib was hunched at his desk one morning over the story lineup for the next bulletin, typing, when Wael Essam called. Essam was upset that his most recent report from Falluja had been broadcast only twice over the weekend. Khatib hadn't seen it. Essam later told me that he puts in these sorts of phone calls fairly regularly to both Khatib and Al-Rashed, complaining that his reports aren't getting enough air time. ''We are the only channel that has this kind of tape!'' he said he told them. ''Why didn't we show it every hour? We have to show it many times!''
Khatib punched a few keys on his computer, and Essam's latest report popped open on his screen. At this point, the American operation in Falluja was winding down. But according to Essam's report, American harassment had not ended. ''More than 200 families in Falluja are under siege by troops,'' Essam's voice said on Khatib's screen.
Khatib leaned in and asked: ''What does he mean? Let us see.''
An Iraqi man angrily told Essam's camera: ''They are not allowing us to go out of our homes. They are arguing when we say we need to go out. They say snipers will shoot if you go out.''
''Well, that doesn't sound like a siege,'' Khatib mused. ''Maybe a curfew. Let us see.'' Then his cellphone chirped. He took the call and muted the audio but kept watching the screen. While he talked, on the video Red Crescent workers searched for a missing man, and a woman sobbed in a rage inside her damaged house. Essam cut to a close-up of holes in her walls.
Khatib hung up, raised the volume and translated for me. ''The woman says she lost her son in this house and now it is damaged,'' he said. ''She is screaming, 'Where should I go now after I lost my house -- to sleep in the street?'''
The next scene showed families leaving their houses to go to a Red Crescent shelter. Khatib rewound the video and played it again. The families loaded into the car again. He rewound again to the beginning, where the man described not being able to leave his house because of snipers. Khatib played the video through to the end, where Essam signed off, sitting casually on a ledge at the Red Crescent shelter with a group of families, new refugees in their own city.
Khatib thought he saw a contradiction there. Essam was reporting that families couldn't go out because of snipers and curfews, but in the second part of the clip families were shown leaving their houses to go to shelters, walking in the street with American soldiers in the background, who did not appear to be shooting at them.
Khatib said: ''I have the feeling that he didn't care that much about being accurate. He just wanted to explain that the people of Falluja are suffering in many ways.'' A little later, Khatib crossed the newsroom floor to head down to the cafeteria for the one meal he eats a day. When he sat down to his meal, his phone rang again. It was Essam. He still hadn't seen his report back on the air. Khatib asked if the curfew Essam described was in place throughout Falluja. Then he asked about the scenes of American soldiers standing around people on their way to shelters. Essam explained that the second scene was from another area in Falluja, which is not under curfew.
Khatib told him: ''If there's still a place where people can't go out, you have to say it is just that part where they can't go out. There is no reason to exaggerate tragedy. The pictures are strong, but it's a big problem for viewers to think everyone in Falluja cannot leave his place.''
Essam's segment was not broadcast again.
Khatib and Al-Rashed share many of the same views about journalism. They are both idealistic about the transformative social power of objective journalism, and both want to push Al Arabiya toward a less emotional, more measured view of the Middle East. But they came to these ideas from experiences that were almost completely opposite.
Al-Rashed's political perspective evolved at a distance from the Arab world, in the United States and England, where he seems to have found life more pleasant, rational and interesting than it is in Saudi Arabia. Khatib's life and career, by contrast, have been bound up in the claustrophobic conflict he was born into. Khatib is the youngest of seven children raised by a widowed mother in Nablus, in the West Bank. He said he first got the idea to be a journalist at age 15, in 1978, after he spent three months being interrogated in an Israeli jail before being released without charges. He was frequently beaten, he told me, and during one such beating, by an Israeli officer who called himself Captain Uzi, Khatib was told he had been arrested for incitement. Khatib didn't know what the word meant. After his release, he asked his oldest brother. ''Incitement,'' his brother told him, ''is journalism.''
When Khatib graduated from high school, he was eager to do whatever he thought would make Captain Uzi most angry, so in 1981 he applied for a Palestine Liberation Organization scholarship to Belarus State University in Minsk to study journalism. His courses trained him in the Soviet art of creating propaganda on behalf of the proletariat. During his sophomore year, when the P.L.O. mobilized students on campus to go to Lebanon to fight the Israeli Army, Khatib was inspired to join, and he persuaded a friend, who was studying medicine, to come with him. When they arrived, Khatib said, he quickly realized how woefully unprepared they were for war. Neither had been given any military training. His friend was killed in front of him, and two weeks later Khatib had had enough. When he flew back to Minsk, his anger had a different focus.
''I was ready to die for a cause, and we were excited to fight for justice,'' he said. ''But it gave me a difficult question about good and bad: Who are these politicians who decide I should go to war when I don't know how to fight -- really to send me to a war when I am not a fighter -- because they want to make a strong showing numbers-wise? Who decided it was the right thing for me to leave my studies?''
After he completed his Ph.D., Khatib returned to the West Bank, where he started his own news agency and eventually became bureau chief for MBC. Reporting on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict brought him close to death again and again. He watched as his colleague Nahum Barnea, a journalist for the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot, discovered that his own son had been killed in a suicide bombing that both men were covering. He reported in Hebron in 1994, after Baruch Goldstein killed 29 Muslims at prayer. He was looking over a list of the dead when an illiterate woman asked him if her son was included. His was the first name on the list, but Khatib couldn't bear to tell her.
Khatib does not discuss these experiences easily, but their imprint on him is apparent. He has a sense about him that there is weight to the task he has been charged with: there is something irrevocable about making a mistake, about getting information wrong. He is clearly sickened by the media landscape of the Arab world. ''Sensationalism incites people to hatred,'' he said. ''I have smelled the blood of hatred, and I cannot understand how someone in an air-conditioned newsroom feels that he has the right to manipulate people's emotions, to rile people up or to generalize about a group, when he sees the repercussions.''
More than anyone else at the station, Khatib was deeply frustrated by the ground rules of Arab TV journalism. Aside from the obvious ethical concerns an editor has about sending a reporter to dangerous places like Iraq and the West Bank, he said, there are other dangers involved in dispatching reporters to Arab countries where there is little or no freedom of the press. ''If in Libya or Egypt I push someone to tell a story that will get him in conflict with the authorities,'' Khatib explained, ''I can't tell them, 'We need it.' Because it goes without saying that this subject is dangerous. This applies to most of the issues that matter -- all the things related to corruption and political conflicts.'' Al-Rashed told me that Al Arabiya can't report freely on the Saudi government because it is Saudi-owned, and the channel is unable to cover Algeria at all right now. Al Arabiya's correspondent has been prohibited from reporting for the last eight months by the government of Abdelaziz Bouteflika, the recently elected president: during the election, the reporter had predicted that Bouteflika's rival would win.
The central problem, as Khatib sees it, is that although Arab journalists have access to state-of-the-art technology, the governmental and civic structures needed to support a free modern press don't exist in the Middle East. ''CNN works in an environment that supports CNN,'' Khatib explained. In the United States, ''there are groups that regulate the media and protect the public interest. There is rule of law and access to information.'' Not so, he said, in nearly every Arab country. Even basic information like demographic statistics is treated as if it were a state secret, and it is almost impossible for the channel to report on the inner workings of Arab governments -- how budgets are drawn up or how leaders are chosen.
To Khatib, those stories are much more important than the daily dose of news from Israel that is a prerequisite for Arab stations, both the old government mouthpieces and the new satellite channels. ''People are lazy,'' Khatib said. ''And Israel is a safe target. The access is easier there than in many Arab countries. But this reporting doesn't help Palestinians know which mayoral candidate to vote for.''
Khatib is in the minority in the newsroom. Right next to his cubicle sat Abdelkader Kharoubi, then the assignment editor. Kharoubi told me that he thinks it makes sense that the Israel-Palestine bureau is Al Arabiya's largest and most sophisticated, because that conflict, he said, is a tragedy unsurpassed in human history: ''Nothing like this ever happened in the world. What happened in Palestine is the most horrible murder in the history of humanity.'' Kharoubi said he thinks that Al Arabiya's reporters should always refer to Jerusalem as '''occupied Jerusalem,' with the emphasis on 'occupied.'''
There is a general feeling around the Al Arabiya offices that since Al-Rashed was named news director, the channel has become pro-American. Kharoubi agrees. Recent injunctions from Al-Rashed and Khatib to balance coverage in Iraq have gone too far, he said. Al-Rashed told me he thinks Al Arabiya's coverage of the Iraq conflict overemphasized civilian deaths in Falluja and played down American military successes against terrorists. Kharoubi thinks the opposite. ''How can you 'balance' civilian deaths?'' he asked me. ''Maybe you could show dead soldiers, but the American government doesn't even want us to show them. When you talk about the agonies of civilians, there is no way to balance it -- they are a different category of people. The Iraqi government says, 'Please concentrate on positive aspects.' Why should we concentrate on good things?''
Kharoubi recently went in to Al-Rashed's office to express his concern that the station's portrayals of the American military and the Iraqi interim government were too positive. He was worried, he said, that it put the channel's Baghdad staff at continued risk. ''One concern I mentioned was that we don't want them to be killed again,'' he said. ''Not by Americans or terrorists.'' He also said that the recent direction in Al Arabiya's coverage means a risk of losing viewers. ''If we keep talking to Arab viewers as if this government'' -- the Allawi government in Iraq -- ''is going to introduce democracy, as if the U.S. Army are very nice occupiers who kill only terrorists, then they won't switch us on,'' he said.
When Al Arabiya's reporters were killed by Americans, Al-Rashed said, the station received hundreds of condolence calls from journalists at other channels, and the reporters were mourned as martyrs. By contrast, after the Al Arabiya bureau in Baghdad was bombed by insurgents, Al-Rashed said, only a few of his colleagues offered a single word about the five employees who died.
Diar al-Omari, an Iraqi-born reporter for Al Arabiya, worries that the channel is increasingly seen in the Arab world as being too partisan toward the Allawi government. ''In Iraq we are losing sympathy,'' he said. ''People are not looking to Arabiya as an independent channel.''
Ehab Elalfy, 30, a burly, bearded Al Arabiya reporter from Egypt, was very happy working at the station until the last few months, he told me. On one afternoon when I visited with him, Elalfy returned from midday prayers to find that he had been assigned to write an item from a wire report on the aftermath of an insurgent attack on American-trained Iraqi soldiers in Mosul. He winced when he got to a line in which an American military spokesman said, ''Twelve more unidentified bodies were found by multinational forces.'' Elalfy said no one specifically told him to stop using the phrase ''occupying forces'' in bulletins, but whenever he does, it is edited out. This isn't the only change at his job that he is annoyed by. A few months ago, he would run searches on Google Arabic every hour or so looking up words like ''Zarqawi,'' the name of an insurgency leader. He would often find a page that was up for just a few hours with a videotaped threat or hostage tape and take it straight to his editor. He said he's proud that because of those efforts, the station was sometimes able to play such tapes before Al Jazeera. But lately his bosses don't seem as interested. As an observant Muslim, Elalfy didn't like these tapes -- he said he thinks they violate Muslim laws about how to treat prisoners of war, especially women and civilians. But still, he thought they belonged on TV.
As Elalfy typed up his report, Rana Abu Atta, a young Al Arabiya reporter from Saudi Arabia with short, curly black hair pulled back with a headband, swung by Elalfy's desk to see if he wanted to get in on her lunch order to Burger King. Elalfy scowled at her.
''Oh, sorry, I forgot!'' she said, and laughed.
For the last eight years, Elalfy has boycotted American products, because, he told me, ''American products help the U.S. administration earn more profit, and they use that profit to provide Israel with weapons to kill Palestinian civilians.''
Until recently, it was the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that dominated Elalfy's imagination and passions. He recently completed an unpublished novel titled ''Me and Best Wishes,'' about an Egyptian journalist who plans to visit the Al Aksa mosque in Jerusalem but doesn't want to recognize the legitimacy of Israel by crossing its border legally. So instead, he sneaks across the Lebanese border with suicide bombers. Elalfy's protagonist is sidetracked in Lebanon when he falls in love with a Palestinian girl, who is killed by an Israeli airstrike. Hopeless, the protagonist decides to ''avenge her death'' by taking part in an attack on Israeli soldiers.
In the smoke-filled stairwell of the MBC building -- where employees conduct business while chugging cigarettes and sipping foamy Nescafe dispensed by a machine -- Elalfy told me that part of the reason he wants to be a novelist is to inspire pan-Arab nationalism. Elalfy said that all Arab lands should be one country; it is ridiculous, he said, that he has to apply for a visa to enter Lebanon. Gamal Abdel Nasser, the former president of Egypt, is his hero, because ''when Egypt came to freedom, it helped all Arab countries become free.''
Elalfy recently started work on a new novel. It is about Iraq, the issue that has joined the Palestinian situation for him as the most pressing and important in the Arab world. It is based in part on his experiences reporting for Al Arabiya from Iraq a few months ago. In Iraq, Elalfy reported stories that were close to his heart and also didn't hesitate to involve himself in what he was reporting. He told me about one incident in which he saw an American soldier manhandling an Iraqi and picked a fight with the soldier. Elalfy said that while reporting from Falluja, he helped pull civilians out of rubble. He kept a little girl's dust-covered green plaid dress and mounted it in a wood frame. ''It was a child named Hannin's,'' Elalfy said. ''She died holding it, and her brother said I could keep it.''
I sat with Elalfy one day when he was asked to take two sound bites from a 45-minute speech by Allawi. He wanted to follow one of Allawi's statements -- that suicide operations in Iraq are not true jihad -- with a statement from an imam saying that in fact they are. But his editors wouldn't let him.
''There's no balance between the points,'' he said, shrugging, seeming defeated. When he finished the report, he drove back to the Gardens, the beige-and-apricot complex where Media City workers live, rubbing a fragrant Egyptian oil on his hands to kill the cigarette smell, a Palestinian kaffiyeh wrapped around the headrest of his passenger seat.
It is unclear if the Department of Defense has changed its view of Al Arabiya since Donald Rumsfeld called it ''violently anticoalition'' a year ago. ''At this point in time, we do not want to offer our evaluation of the editorial content or direction of a particular news outlet,'' a Department of Defense spokesman, Lt. Col. Barry Venable, told me late last month. George Bush did choose to give Al Arabiya an interview after the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, and Al Arabiya's business manager, Shafaat Khan, said he was visited by a few American generals in the summer who wanted to establish friendly relations. They summed up their view of the Arab media by saying that as they understood it, ''Al Jazeera is very, very bad, and Al Arabiya is bad.''
But on the newsroom floor, producers and editors said they find it difficult to get the American perspective when they want to put it on the air. On Nov. 19, gunfire broke out at a mosque in northern Baghdad. Khatib said he immediately had a local sheik on the line offering his account of the attack: that the United States Army opened fire on civilians. But Khatib saw in the footage an exchange of fire and wondered if the mosque had been harboring fighters. He spent the 45 minutes until air time trying to get an American or Iraqi government account of the incident; three hours later, he still didn't have one.
''To my surprise,'' he said, ''the opposition is doing better, P.R.-wise, than the official Americans and Iraqis, who are not as readily available for comment to give their side as the opposition. The militants are ready with a video of masked men and a person available for comment a half-hour after the story breaks.'' Khatib went ahead and broadcast the segment on the gun battle at the mosque without the Army's side of the story; he said that the segment looked unbalanced but that he had a choice between an incomplete segment or not covering the fight at all.
The United States government's primary strategy with the Arab media has been to create its own outlets -- the satellite-news station Al Hurra and Radio Sawa -- at a cost of $100 million, rather than engage aggressively with existing Arab media stations. But as a result, there is no easy mechanism for journalists at these stations to find American voices, even ones that might be able to make a sympathetic case to Arab viewers. One night, Nael Najdawi, a middle-aged producer in suspenders, ran up to me in the newsroom, his glasses bouncing off the cord around his neck. He asked me if I knew anyone who was related to a victim of the Sept. 11 attacks. I said that a woman in my neighborhood whom I had met a few times lost her brother. ''Can we get her to go live for the 10 o'clock bulletin?'' he asked.
Officials in the State Department's public diplomacy division have argued for more direct engagement with the Arab media. But Norman Pattiz, a member of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, who masterminded Al Hurra and Radio Sawa, told me he thinks that view is mistaken, because it ''presupposes that the indigenous media is the solution, not the problem.'' Pattiz speaks about the Arab media as a monolith. In a recently published essay, he wrote: ''Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya transcend traditional media roles. They function, in effect, as quasi-political movements, reflecting two of the defining characteristics of the Middle East today. One is the lack of political and press freedom. The other is Arab nationalism. Arab networks manifest both.'' He said Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya do this by covering news that Arab regimes suppress and stories that ''intensely arouse Arab passions,'' namely the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the war in Iraq.
Among experts who track the Arab media, there is a debate over whether this kind of coverage is good or bad for the prospects of democracy in the Middle East. Marc Lynch, assistant professor of political science at Williams College, agrees with Norman Pattiz that the satellite networks focus on hot-button issues -- his recent research broke down coverage on Al Jazeera since 1999 and found that the top three topics shifted among Iraq, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Arab political reform -- but to Lynch, this makes Al Jazeera the most pro-democracy of all the stations in the Arab world: it reflects public opinion and opens up space for political debate.
William Rugh, a former United States ambassador and now an adjunct scholar at the Middle East Institute, likewise thinks that the dialogue on Al Jazeera, heated though it may be, opens up discussions that force authorities to be more accountable. But he says that Al Jazeera's attention to controversial issues and different points of view has not translated into democratic politics. ''That next step has not been taken as you might expect in terms of bringing democracy to the Arab world,'' he says. ''People haven't formed political parties and interest groups. You can't assume that just because there is a lot of shouting going on that there is a lot of transparency and accountability going on.''
S. Abdallah Schleifer, director of Adham Center for Television Journalism at the American University in Cairo, says that part of a healthy democracy is that there are certain ground rules for discussion. ''The danger of a press moving from an authoritarian mode is sensationalism, which is sometimes evident in Al Jazeera,'' he says. ''Things are said on that network that would never be said in England and America because they are moving into uncharted territory, and so there are no taboos, no libel and slander, no limits to what one says.''
Schleifer went on to say that he hopes Al Arabiya's more cautious and more professional approach will provide a foil for Al Jazeera: ''It might show that you could have a free press operating but with manners, and democracy depends on good manners.''
Khatib said he plans to stay at Al Arabiya for only a year. Although Dubai is an easier place to live than Ramallah, he said he doesn't want to stay because he is troubled by the ''huge gap'' between Dubai and the world Al Arabiya broadcasts to. ''In New York, as an editor, you can go have coffee, and everything around you gives you the feeling of the place,'' he told me one day in the newsroom. ''Working in Cairo, just going to work in the morning as an editor, you might see 10 people asking for money and come up with 200 stories. In Dubai, the most you see on your way to work is traffic.''
Khatib said that people in Dubai ''don't live in the real world, the Arab world, and this affects the depth and the richness of our reporting.'' Gesturing to the newsroom, he said: ''They convey reality through glass. It's fake. I don't want to be like those who are away from the public. I felt this the first day I was here. If the network succeeds and I stay, I will lose what made me a good journalist.''
But when pressed, Khatib also admitted that he is not enthusiastic about returning to his bureau in the West Bank. He said he is always treated as a Palestinian first and a journalist second, being held at checkpoints for hours en route to appointments. And he said that at times, the struggle to offer calm reports about a painful situation was overwhelming. ''I am tired of the process,'' he said, ''and the constant tension to hold my emotions at bay, and I don't feel that in a year or two years it will end.''
Khatib took the job at Al Arabiya, he said, because he thought ''the Arab world was not able to be as moderate and free as it could be, because they are not getting true information.'' He wanted to be a bridge between ideals he holds about journalism and the realities of Arab reporting, and he thought he could have real impact at Al Arabiya.
But now that he has been in Dubai for four months, he said late one night in the marble lobby of the MBC building, the distance between those points seems vast. ''I am not sure I can personally afford to pay the price for this success, even if it is possible,'' he said wearily.
Al-Rashed is usually more optimistic about the prospects for Al Arabiya, and for creating a truly free press in a region that is not free. But when pressed, he admits that his undertaking is risky, and that the cost of failure would be great. ''In a real way, I have to win this,'' he said one evening as his driver took us to the station. ''I have been preaching for a long time these kinds of thoughts, and if it doesn't work, I have to walk out and say, 'It didn't work -- you're on your own.' I am dragging everyone with me on this. I have to succeed.''
Samantha M. Shapiro is a contributing writer. She last wrote for the magazine about students at an evangelical Christian college.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/02/magazine/02ARAB.html?th=&pagewanted=print&position=