My point is simple but important: We must not forget that the word "media" is a plural. From this it follows that the capacities and scales of media are also plural. I think this is important because when the word "discourse" acquired a technical sociological meaning and became a common tool of academic analysis, the different capacities and scales of media became flattened. In the issue we're discussing, "Media" and "a Western discourse on Islam" became inseparable. To the limited extent that we've tried to understand media produced in the Middle East by Muslims, we have mirrored our unconscious tendency to pair "a discourse" on Islam with "media." This is an implicit assertion that "a discourse" works through all media, which in effect turns all media into a single entity. When I say that we had done this, I don't mean just academics in thrall to Foucault. Journalists are involved in it as well. In the ten years since I finished my dissertation the single most common query I have gotten from everyone—students, journalists, well-meaning social activists, documentary filmmakers, audiences at film festivals, and members of my own family, is this: What do they make of us? How are we represented in Egyptian films? How do Arabs represent the West? In other words, do they have a discourse about us, just as we have a discourse about them?

As a term "discourse" has become reified in the same manner as "culture." Culture used to be an anthropologists' term, but now anthropologists mean something quite different by it than they used to, and at the same time the general public has started using "culture" in a quasi technical sense that anthropologists consider outmoded. The same thing has happened to "discourse," which in the context of media is often associated with bias of varying degrees. I emphasize that I'm not saying this because I don't acknowledge media bias. Is there a pattern of pro-Israeli and anti-Muslim bias in most U.S. media productions? Of course there is—it would be dishonest to claim otherwise. Do Egyptian films cross the line from opposing Israeli oppression of the Palestinians into anti-Semitism? Of course they do. It's unmistakable. But approaching the way media productions portray certain issues as broadly patterned isn't the same as flattening media into a single non-plural discourse. One obvious implication of seeing media as a discourse is that one is required to deny the exceptions—the American and European media productions that aren't reflexively anti-Muslim and pro-Israeli; or the Egyptian films that are well aware of the trap of anti-Semitism and successfully avoid it. My point is that when you lose sight of the plurality inherent in the word "media" you start to abandon the tools to understand how the patterns develop historically. Another way of putting it would be to say that a media discourse is the end-point of an analysis; but a pattern is the beginning point.

The accusations levelled al-Jazeera satellite broadcasts in the American press are a classic example of flattening the pluralism of media into a singular discourse. As far as I can tell the origin of the idea that al-Jazeera is dedicated to anti-Americanism and that it panders to radical Islamist sentiments began with a newspaper article by Fuad Ajami in the New York Times shortly after the September 11^th terrorist attacks. The bandwagon effect of this article was tremendous. In the late 1990s al-Jazeera was being hailed by American and European academics as the Great White Hope for instilling civil society and democratic values in the Arab world. The media picked up on this, and one saw the occasional article in the New York Times or the Washington Post about the lively debates being broadcast by the station. It was certainly seen the same way in the Middle East. The first time I encountered it was in the company of a couple of Egyptian movie directors, one Christian, the other Muslim, and both cosmopolitan and multi-lingual. They just raved about it, and yes, they even said they had switched to it from CNN once it became available.

How different from the current situation. In the United States Al-Jazeera has been sufficiently vilified that its alleged Islamist credentials have been consecrated as fact in the minds of many Americans. The September 11^th attacks were a catalyst for this transformation, but it couldn't have happened so quickly if people hadn't had ready access to a concept of discourse. This made the transformation of al-Jazeera from hero to villain like flipping a switch: one minute it's the harbinger of democracy; the next minute, it's the mouthpiece of Bin Laden, and never mind that the truth might be much more complex, and potentially rather messy. The stakes are very different if the representation of al-Jazeera as anti-American is a discourse, than if it is a pattern that develops from recognisable and analyse-able historical forces. A discourse is almost immovable; in academic parlance it can be resisted, but resistance is substantially futile. Orientalism is the classic example: it's meant to have been a part of Europe from the Greeks to the present. That extreme argument about the persistence of Orientalist discourse has been criticized, but it has also been internalized. A pattern, by contrast, changes; its roots can be discerned; exceptions can be more easily explained because understanding it calls for engagement with history and details.

Let me return to my point that it pays to remember that media is a plural. Clearly governments had begun to worry about this before Fuad Ajami wrote his piece in the New York Times and opened the floodgates of al-Jazeera vilification in the U.S. It's pretty obvious that governments yearn for media borders. For a relatively short period they thought they had them; everyone lived with the illusion that a nation was also a community in which everyone spoke the same language, and the whole thing was knitted together by media that were oriented to this community alone. The illusion of a centralized media field corresponding to a national community has been shattered by the effect of both "small media"—the fax, the telephone, the audiocassette—and by deterritorialized media—satellite broadcasting, and the internet, which, from a user's perspective, combines deterritorialization with scales that range from individuals trading messages to vast networks.

Throughout the 1990s academic conferences were held to discuss the implications of the newly palpable diversity in media on the Arab world. I don't think governments were always quite in sync with these developments. Usually the gist of new media discussions is that free-flowing media would force Arab governments to change because they could no longer control the flow of information. But unease at the new media landscape is hardly restricted to Arab governments. I became aware of this in the summer of 2001, when I was invited to attend a focus group meeting in Washington at the Voice of America. The focus group consisted mostly of Arab American community leaders—I was the token gringo. The reason the meeting was convened was that the American government had decided to phase out the Arabic Voice of America radio program because nobody listened to it. They wanted to replace it with a program that appealed to Arab youth—to the mythical "street." We were meant to advise them on how to make it appealing. The group confirmed that a popular music format would be more appealing than the traditional stodgy VOA format, and that there was plenty of leeway to create attractive talk shows and debates. But every single one of the media consultants invited to the meeting told the VOA two things: one was that radio itself was no longer as powerful as it had been because there were so many new media outlets: satellite television, revamped national t.v. programs, and the internet for example. The second thing was that no packaging could be attractive enough to sell an American government radio program that supported American policy—and the VOA officials assured us that despite the proposed remake, the station would indeed still be required to promote government policy. I emphasize that this meeting took place before September 11—the issue of the moment was the Intifada in Palestine, not Usama bin Laden. Furthermore, the VOA officials insisted that this initiative was already underway during the Clinton administration. On one hand you have to admire the Americans' faith in the marketplace of ideas. The initiative was being sold as a way to "get our message out," and supposedly once it was out its superiority to the alleged hate mongering and sensationalism of the Arab media would be obvious to all. But on the other hand, it's pretty stunning how short-sighted the government was (and clearly still is). In many ways the Middle East has access to more media variety than Americans do. To put it bluntly, Arabs are better at languages. A substantial portion of Arab consumers who have access to al-Jazeera also have access to CNN, the BBC, and a host of other television channels. When my film director friends said they had changed the channel from CNN to al-Jazeera they were being a bit misleading. Egyptians channel surf as much as Americans. The point is that for a decade they've been able to lay CNN and the BBC and al-Jazeera side by side and compare. They'll do the same with "Radio Sawa"—"radio together" as the replacement for the VOA is called. And when I say "they," I mean a pretty large class of bilingual and multilingual men and women living in the Arab world. We're talking about millions of people here, and there's no question that these millions are a key political element whose influence is out of proportion to their numbers. By contrast, the only people in the United States and Europe who can do the same—actually compare media products—are once again, Arabs (Arab immigrants that is), and a miniscule group of academic media specialists. So in the context of "Radio Sawa," the former VOA, and the American government's concern to "get its message out," it's impossible not to conclude with a bit of advice that I hasten to add I didn't invent—I've seen this in print in several places. My advice for the American government is, of course, this: "It's the policy stupid." The role of media is powerful and important, but in the end it's a mistake to assume that it is solely responsible for creating attitudes—attitudes about Muslims and Europeans, or by Muslims and Europeans. That's all. The floor is now open.