As a genre, journalist memoirs often fail to deliver. The dust jacket promises "the story behind the story," but the book ends up being an interminable notebook dump.
This isn't the case with New York Times reporter Neil MacFarquhar's new book, The Media Relations Department of Hizbollah Wishes You a Happy Birthday. Styled as travelogue, this book has some memorable episodes: Encounters with an eccentric Muammar el-Qaddafi; tea with the secret police; listening on the dial-a-sheikh line. MacFarquhar also writes with a light touch, and that's particularly welcome when you're talking about someone who had to cover the almost monotonous routine of violence in the Middle East.
Enthusiasts of "strategic communications" -- who think that U.S. problems in the Middle East can be solved by better image management -- should give this book a close read. MacFarquhar is at his best when he describes the way that the new media are changing the region.
Much has been written about the advent of satellite television in the Middle East: Channels like Al-Jazeera invigorated Arab broadcasting, breaking the monopoly of stultifying, state-owned television channels (and stirring up no small share of controversy in the process). MacFarquhar recognizes this, but he also points to a newer phenomenon: The impact of social networking and online forums.
MacFarquhar tells the story of Ali Abdulemam, “the most notorious webmaster in Bahrain,” who founded the go-to political site for the Gulf kingdom of Bahrain. He describes how Egyptian activists use the net to circumvent limits on free expression and tried Facebook to organize a nationwide strike in 2008.
"There is no question that people have become more daring in challenging the government and that the Internet spurs such efforts," he writes. "When a van driver was sodomized with a broomstick in a local police station, the cell phone video circulated so quickly that the [Egyptian] government was forced to respond. … This kind of exposure was 100 times more effective than scores of human rights reports, activists told me."
These new tools, it seems, are more powerful than the U.S. government throwing money at another doomed enterprise like the Al-Hurra network. As Iran's recent election protests showed, pro-reform movements don't need direct U.S. funding. As MacFarquhar notes, U.S. attempts to bankroll reform often does more harm than good, and reform-minded people are often branded as U.S. agents. Take the case of Bahraini columnist Sawsan al-Shair. When she wrote a column supporting a U.S.-funded study on child abuse, "she was accused of being on the payroll of the American Embassy to promote its ideas."
MacFarquhar senses that some kind of tectonic shift may be underway in the region, but the best approach for the United States may be to be more principled in its own actions, rather than hectoring other countries about democracy and placing its bets on dubious agents of change.
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