"Nobody believes the Arab media. It is not dangerous at all… I don't believe that this is as dangerous as a (western) media that believes it is a free media and objective," Bishara

DUBAI, October 8 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) - Arab and western media heavyweights locked horns on Tuesday, October 7, in the Arab emirate of Dubai over the coverage of the U.S.-led war on Iraq, with Arab reporters accusing their western peers of promoting the agenda of the U.S. administration.

The media behemoths huddled together in the Arab Media Summit, which opened Tuesday under the theme of "War and The Media" at Madinat Jumeirah Resort, trading charges over visions of a "responsible" media versus the "cowboy: if it bleeds, it leads," reported Agence France-Presse.

"I would like to ask western journalists, and especially the Americans, to stop giving us lessons in freedom of the press," Hamdi Qandeel, an Egyptian TV presenter, said.

"Our crisis is authority - whether it be Arab authority or American authority," he said to thunderous applause in the plush conference hall of the deluxe hotel.

Arab journalists also roundly criticized what they felt was blatant pro-American boosterism of the western press covering the Iraq war and the deionization of all Muslims after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States.

Azmi Bishara, an Israeli Arab politician who heads the National Democratic Alliance and a writer, lashed out at the western media's claims of objectivity and freedom, dismissing in the meantime notions of a totalitarian press in the Middle East.

"Nobody believes the Arab media. It is not dangerous at all… I don't believe that this is as dangerous as a (western) media that believes it is a free media and objective," Bishara told the summit, which was supposed to find common grounds between the two worlds.

Janine Di Giovanni, the Times Senior foreign correspondent, regretted the quarrel between reporters.

"This was supposed to be a meeting of the minds. Instead it's like a tennis match," lamented Di Giovanni, who covered Iraq and sat on a panel analyzing the performance of western journalists.

She also covered conflicts in the Balkans, Africa, Asia and North Africa.

'Truths Died'

And Danny Schechter, an American media writer who said he was "self-embedded" in front of his television set during the war, warned the U.S. media to take a long look and heal itself.

"There is more in the United States than CNN," Schechter said. "The question we have to ask ourselves is why certain truths died in this war, including the idea of a free and independent media."

But Pulitzer Prize winner and war veteran Peter Arnett judged the western media was covering Iraq "adequately" and said the challenge for the Arabs "is in presenting the Iraqi story in a way that hopefully will be beneficial to the Iraqi people."

Arnett, who is famed for his coverage of the notorious Vietnam War, has been sacked by the U.S. news network NBC after he suggested on Iraqi television that the U.S. war plan had failed and for his credible pieces.

"They don't want credible news organizations reporting from here because it presents them with enormous problems," Arnett said.

'Selective'

"The challenge for the Arabs is in presenting the Iraqi story in a way that hopefully will be beneficial to the Iraqi people," Arnett

But the tough-nosed interviewer of the BBC's "Hard Talk," Tim Sebastian, accused an Arab reporter of being "selective" in his judgments about the Western media.

""How much do you try to understand the many shades of western opinion?" barked Sebastian. "How far do you get past the labels and clichés?"

However, he was challenged sharply by Nima Abu-wardeh, of Dubai TV.

Noting that Sebastian had spoken of mass killings under ousted Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, Abu-wardeh wondered why he had not mentioned more than one million Iraqis whose deaths were attributed to U.N. sanctions.

"This is being conveniently selective," she said.

Last month, the U.S.-sanctioned interim Governing Council of Iraq banned on the Arab TV stations Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya from covering official activities for two weeks.

The decision has been criticized by the western media, which dismissed the decision as "a blow to press freedom."

During the war, U.S. missiles hit the Baghdad offices of Al Jazeera, killing and wounding two staff in what the Qatar-based Arabic news network charged as a deliberate attack.