Veteran Egytian journalist Mohamed Hassanein Heikal recently delivered the first Reuters Lecture since the establishment of the Reuters Institute at St Anne's college, Oxford.
Mr Heikal provided a different perspective on western media coverage of the Middle East and the Muslim world. He asked how different the birth of modern Europe and the US would have looked if events ranging from the Hugeonot massacres in France and the American civil war, to the 20th century's two world wars, had been subjected to the same trial by 24 hour TV news that the Muslim world gets today.
There was also praise for the achievements of the journalism "developed in the North" as Mr Heikal phrases it.
"Thanks largely to the vigilance and good faith of many of its practitioners, and despite the density of vested interests, the seeming impenetrability of decision making centres and the obstacles placed in the pathway of the free flow of information and ideas, journalism has continued to shine a light on areas that are profoundly important to the world's future security.
"For example, and in the face of the best efforts of the Israel and its influential friends, people in the North have learned some of the truth regarding events in Palestine and the cause of a people uprooted from their land and corralled into desolate camps and ghettos.
"And in spite of the influence of the neoconservatives, and what we might call neo-Orientalists, the truth about Iraq has been revealed, beginning from the unprovoked invasion of an Arab country on the bases of false pretexts, proceeding through its destruction through an arrogant display of might and appalling display of ignorance, resulting, up till now, in the death of half a million Iraqi civilians and three million displaced persons and refugees."
However, the crux of Mr Heikal's critique of western journalism was that it cast an unfailingly critical eye over the "Muslim East... at a critical stage in its attempts to make the transition from the old to the new, as it struggles from a position lagging behind".
"It is useful to remember that the birth of modern Europe, which lasted for nearly four centuries, took place behind closed curtains whereas the labour pains of the South are taking place in a theatre that is surgically lit.
"Europe's birth pangs must perforce remain muffled, heard only at a distance, sanitised on the pages of written history. The agonies of labour in the Arab Muslim South are broadcast to the world live, moment-by-moment, in lurid colour and gory detail.
"As such, a process that history might eventually have recorded as a one of natural birth became an international scandal.
"Some of my colleagues in the North may ask but what can we do about that, it is how things are in today's world. And in a sense they are right. The media in the West cannot be expected to memorize history every time it covers an event in the South. But there is something it can do. It can appeal to the moral equivalent of historical recapitulation and borrow some elements from the culture of open-mindedness, sympathy and objectivity.
"Is it too farfetched to ask what would have happened had such media giants as ABC, CBS, NBC, SKY, FOX, CNN and Al Jazeera been around to record Europe's feudal conflicts and its religious, national and class wars?
"Imagine if hordes of reporters and cameras had been on hand at the St. Bartholomew massacre, when hundreds of thousands of French Huguenots were slaughtered by their Catholic compatriots, their hatred fomented by their cardinals and rulers.
"...Imagine the consequences of twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week coverage of the horrors of the American civil war, in which brother turned against brother, fields were razed, homes and villages burned to the ground, and hundreds of thousands were killed.
"...What would have been the effect had the media had the ability to broadcast live over television and satellite networks scenes from some of the darkest episodes in human history, chapters that remain within living memory, and which were written and produced entirely by the North? I refer here to such twentieth century blights as anti-Semitism, Stalinism, Imperialism, Fascism, Nazism and the Holocaust, with its millions of victims - both Jews and non-Jews.
"...The modern media had just been born when World War I ground to a close. It was in its infancy as World War II ran its bloody course. Both these wars were conflicts between Northern powers, though the combatants extended the theatre of conflict across continents, sucking all nations into the carnage and leaving between 60 and 70 million dead.
"World War II crashed to a close with the first use of nuclear weapons. It wasn't covered live. The echoes of the tragedy, though, resounded everywhere and the entire world, North and South, said never again. Yet half a century on and US forces in Afghanistan and Iraq were using weaponry containing depleted uranium.
"Arrogant, contemptuous, insanely reckless are words that spring to mind when I think about it."
