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Introduction
In light of the treatment and actions of journalists during the Iraqi war, the Prism Group has conducted a survey on the overall integrity and freedom of the press in the Middle East. Our conclusions are that freedom of the press, a concept touted in much of the Western world, is sadly lacking in most of the Middle East. In some cases, some sources have suggested that given the difficulties of operating in largely non-democratic countries, leading Western news agencies themselves have failed to live up to western standards. Elsewhere, the right of freedom of the press is granted according to the law of the land, but is largely ignored in practice.

Journalists Located Overseas
At any given moment, there are more than 3000 foreign accredited journalists in the Middle East – approximately 600 in Israel and the Palestinian Authority areas alone (Tarik Kafula, BBC online). Today, journalists stationed in Middle Eastern countries can be found traveling in tanks, reporting from the front lines of a battle in progress, and even attending clandestine meetings of terrorist organizations.

Recent revelations into the actions of some multinational news agencies has damaged the industry and led to charges that priorities have shifted and that the desire to “get” the story has led to questionable actions on the part of journalists. In some cases, human rights violations have been ignored for fear that reporting such instances might jeopardize the news organizations right to continue operating in a country. For example, in a recent opinion piece in the New York Times, CNN executive Eason Jordan acknowledged that the network regularly covered up stories of Iraqi torture and atrocities. (The News We Kept to Ourselves).

CNN is not the only news organization to have its actions questioned. In a recent National Review article, the integrity of The New York Times itself has been called into question. According to former London Telegraph Middle East correspondent Tom Gross, “The distortions of the media are depressing not only because they are untrue, but because they set back the day when there might be peace and coexistence between Israeli and Palestinian.”

Local Reporters
According to Middle East expert Daniel Pipes, journalists regard the Arab world as the "arc of silence." (Daniel Pipes, The Long Shadow: Culture and Politics in the Middle East, NJ: Transaction Publishers 1990, p. 278.) This arc of silence extends itself to the severe limitation of freedom of movement and which results in the inability to accurately portray facts on the ground. The annual reports compiled by the US State Department support this claim, stating that most Arab states ‘deny their citizens basic freedoms of political expression, speech, press and due process’. (U.S. State Department, Reports on Human Rights Practices for 1999.) The Arab Human Development Report published by Arab researchers from the UN concluded that out of the seven regions of the world, Arab countries had the lowest ranking for the media’s "voice and accountability" (Arab Human Development Report, UN Development Report, 2002, NY: UN, 2002).

Report card on the Freedom of the Press in the Middle East
This report researched the level of freedom of the press in seven different areas of the Middle East. In many of these places, freedom of the press may be guaranteed under the law, but non-existent in practice. In other places, the laws ignore the issue entirely. In most of these countries, merely criticizing the government can result in a jail sentence or worse. Following the Iraqi war, many stories have surfaced about people who were overheard criticizing Saddam Hussein and were then thrown into jail. Similar documentation can be found in the reports of Amnesty International, Transparency International and other leading monitoring organizations. Our sources for the following include the US State Department, Reporters without Borders and other organizations dedicated to monitoring and promoting freedom of the press.

Summary
Some international news agencies have determined that being able to report from a certain country is more important than what is reported. This has led to the sad situation in which major stories are not revealed. The ethics and integrity of several well known journalists have been called into question as a result of their willingness to compromise on the truth, their desire to report some of the facts, knowing that reporting them all would result in their deportation, or worse.

Others have been accused of favoritism of one side or another, further calling into question their impartiality and ability to truly report the news in a fair and balanced manner.

It is hoped that the vast majority of the world really wants to be able to trust the media. For those people, and for all of us, the real question to ask now, as the Wall Street Journal put it on April 11th, 2003, is: (Now that we know that journalists often do not report accurately on events in the Middle East) "what are … news organizations failing to tell us about other thuggish regimes, from communist Cuba to the Palestinian Authority?"

There is little freedom of the press in the Middle East, as judged by western standards. Based on our studies, freedom of the press in the Middle East ranges from countries such as Saudi Arabia and Syria, which practice severe censorship to the point of imprisonment to countries such as Israel where the values are similar to those of western countries such as England, the United States, or France.