Hacene Zitouni

Believe Me, I Was There: Behind the Scenes As an Arab TV Reporter Hacene Zitouni

Believe Me is a lively and dramatic account of one man's struggle to make two cultures meet. In 1990 Zitouni started broadcasting news for MBC (Middle-eastern Broadcasting Company) in Arabic from London. MBC was the first station to give Arab viewers, at home and in the worldwide diaspora, their own news programmes. For the first time, interviewees were heard speaking demotic Arabic of their own regions. MBC's Western impartiality and lack of deference was controversial but on the whole, popular. As a country boy born into newly independent Algeria in the 1960s, Zitouni had been educated by the state and sent to Britain on a journalism scholarship. He became a war correspondent in '91. His career has taken him to trouble spots in Yemen, Chechnya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, Somalia, Bosnia, Indonesia and many other countries. He has made Panorama-style documentaries in both American continents and interviewed historic figures. He was detained and interrogated by Gaddafi's army for many weeks, and interviewed some of the wilder insurgents fighting Bashar al Assad. Zitouni recounts the ups and downs of his own fast-developing career against a background in which commercial and local political considerations have come to play a much greater part. Based for many years in London, Paris and Dubai, he has seen the agenda of Arab television changing. Although MBC is funded by the Saudi royal family, its ethos when it began was impartial and cautiously liberal. In 1994, after a culture clash with a new BBC Arabic service, the Qatari royals set up the rival Al Jazeera to do what MBC had always done. In response, MBC changed tack, offering multiple entertainment streams and eventually a subsidiary: a re-invention of its original news channel called Al Arabiya. While all this was going on Zitouni was Director General of a third channel that promised to lead the field - but turned out to belong to a billionaire fraudster. Now he shows us where Arab TV seems to be going...