Lawrence Pintak shows an American audience a picture of an American soldier in Iraq sitting on the ground at a checkpoint as he cradles an infant. The audience reacts positively to the picture and in reflection on the moment, Pintak declares: “They [an American audience] think warm thoughts, ‘This is exactly what we want our soldiers to be doing.’ As I told our troops at the [US] Naval Academy [at Annapolis] a few weeks ago, ‘This is what Americans want you guys to be doing. They want you out there comforting the afflicted and saving babies.’

“But the same image,” he continues, “ran in the Arab press with a caption that told the whole story: The kid’s parents had just been shot at the checkpoint. The same image has a completely different story attached to it,” he says.

It’s that nuanced understanding of the way two different audiences view the war in Iraq that makes Pintak especially qualified to be the new director of the American University in Cairo’s Adham Center for Electronic Journalism, where he follows in the footsteps of the now-retired Abdalla Schleifer. Pintak comes to Cairo after 25 years of working as a CBS correspondent in the Arab and greater Islamic worlds.

This isn’t about bias, it isn’t about sensationalism. It’s about completely different versions of reality.

His new book, America, Islam and the War of Ideas: Reflections in a Bloodshot Lens, comes out this month through the AUC Press. Pintak “transitioned into academia,” as he likes to put it, in 2000, when he went to a research center at Harvard and then to the University of Michigan as visiting professor of journalism, where he remained until last year. After years of trying to compress his reporting about the Middle East and the Muslim world into scant minutes of television news, he decided to start writing more analysis, more opinion, and finally, more books. In his new work, he tries to look at the divide in perception between America and the Islamic world.

“The cliché is that 9/11 changed everything, and yes it really did. But it changed everything in terms of highlighting the disconnect that has always existed, exacerbating the polarization,” Pintak says. “The tragedy of 9/11 is, of course, the death of all the people, but the other tragedy is the level of sympathy toward the US in the Muslim world in the weeks after 9/11. It was the highest in modern history. Columns across the Muslim world were saying, ‘We denounce the attacks.’ They were even saying, ‘We recognize the US is going to have to take some form of military action, but we just hope that comes with a re-evaluation of US policy as well’,” Pintak says. The real tragedy, he explains, is that, in the years that followed, America has managed to alienate those who might have been sympathetic in 2001.

In his writing, Pintak argues that Americans are only shown part of the picture.

“I have a Powerpoint presentation I show to audiences. I talk about the fact that here in the Arab world, you have at least some sense of what Americans are seeing because you see CNN international, although it is different from CNN domestically, but at least you have some sense. Americans have no sense of what people in the Arab world are seeing. This is another reason for the polarization: the fact that Americans genuinely don’t understand why Arabs are that out of shape in their view. ‘Why so upset?’ they wonder. ‘We are bringing freedom and democracy to Iraq.’

“I show audiences how first of all the same images are perceived and received differently in these two cultures because of history and stereotyping,” Pintak explains. Take the image of the Saddam statue coming down on the day Baghdad fell: “In the West, this is the iconic image everyone expected, akin to the Berlin Wall coming down. The statue of the tyrant falling epitomized what America wanted to do. Here in the Arab world people saw a wider, un-cropped version of that picture. You saw American troops pulling down the statue, further evidence of American colonization,” says Pintak.

Pintak offers a further example of the disparity of view: “Here in the Arab world, you saw split-screen images of Israeli tanks at Ramallah and American tanks at Fallujah. You saw reporting through an Arab lens inside Ramallah. You saw the dead babies, the civilian casualties, whereas Americans saw it represented from outside Ramallah. Arabs saw it from inside Fallujah, Americans saw it from outside Fallujah, embedded with the Americans — completely different versions of the same reality. Americans genuinely don’t understand it when I show these images. This isn’t about bias, it isn’t about sensationalism. It’s about completely different versions of reality. Americans saw a sanitized war. They did not see the coffins coming back, whereas you were seeing — in a very graphic and sometimes sensational way — the dead babies, the wounds, the bloodshed,” he explains.

Pintak, who has reported from the region since 1980, can relate to the chasm that developed during those determining years when American media pulled out of Beirut and the Middle East in 1985.

“We stayed for about a year through the kidnappings,” he says. “The first American to be kidnapped was the CNN correspondent, but we all knew that was an inside job. People in his office had him kidnapped and then he was sold to Islamic Jihad. He wasn’t a very popular guy in his office. We knew it did not necessarily reflect danger to us. Then diplomats were kidnapped, and then university professors were kidnapped. All through that, we told ourselves we would be the last ones because they wanted us around to report what was happening. That held true until the fall of 1984, right before Reagan’s re-election. They had blown up the embassy, and Americans were under siege. We looked around and realized we were it, there were no more male Americans left in West Beirut, except for a handful of journalists, so the odds kind of changed,” he says.

The veteran journalist’s drivers at the time were carrying guns, and even his Lebanese camera crew did not want him on the streets with them.

“I became a prisoner of our office and the Commodore Hotel. I couldn’t do my job. We were the only Americans left to blow up. It wasn’t very attractive,” he remembers. Still, Pintak wanted to stay. “The administration tried to frighten us out of Beirut. The Reagan administration had put out word that we were being targeted. They did not want us around if something else happened before the elections to make them look bad. They had people at the embassy call us and say, ‘We’re really worried about you.’ But we checked around and found that wasn’t the case. That made us dig our heels in,” Pintak says.

But a few days before the elections, the journalist realized that he was one of three American males left in Beirut.

“I had been under a lot of pressure from our headquarters to leave, so I finally decided to go. Unfortunately, Terry Anderson was one of the other Americans left, and he was kidnapped and kept for seven years,” he recalls. According to Pintak, this is where the divide between Americans and the Muslim world really started.

When Americans today ask “Why do they hate us?” or “Why can’t we understand what’s going on?” Pintak’s answer is often: “Because there was no one left reporting for the American networks.”

“I lived in Amman for about a year, and then CBS — all three networks, actually [CBS, NBC and ABC] — closed their bureaus in the Arab World. It is not because of me as a journalist, not because of my reporting per se. What I was told at the time was that the Marines had left Beirut, so we don’t need to cover the Arab world anymore,” Pintak says.

NBC and ABC told their correspondents roughly the same thing, he claims. Although CNN and some of the newspapers stayed, they were downsized considerably. What happened in the 1980s laid the ground for Pintak’s second book, Seeds of Hate.

“In the 1980s, I did a book called Beirut Outtakes, which looked at the US’ involvement in Beirut. [Initially, the Marines] were welcomed by many Lebanese, in 1982. It was as the US was hoping it would be: People did throw rice. Shiites and Palestinians felt the US was protecting them from the Israelis. And very systematically and unfortunately, the US turned Lebanese Muslims against US forces,” he explains.

After 9/11, Pintak took his book and did a rewrite, updating it and calling it Seeds of Hate. “I showed how those seeds of hate were laid in Beirut and then fed everything else that followed. That same kind of alienation was repeated again and again in the Muslim world, and obviously the suicide bombings started in Beirut. I traced the connection between that and the terrorism today. I take it up through 2003,” he says.

In his current book project, America, Islam and the War of Ideas, Pintak looks at what has happened since 9/11, explaining “the compilation of disconnect in worldview, in perceptions, in communication, driving the polarization between the US and the Muslim world.”

According to Pintak, the ongoing controversy over a Dutch newspaper’s publication of cartoons satirizing the Prophet Mohammed (PBUH) is yet more proof of the growing gap between the West and the Muslim World.

“It shows, first of all, this disconnect, and secondly there is a tendency of writers on both sides not to understand or care how their actions are perceived on the other side. It also exemplifies the fact that there is a difference in the way Western reporters and Arab reporters perceive their responsibility and their role in society. There was a great quote this morning from the Danish consul-general in Dubai: ‘I don’t think anyone in their wildest imagination would have expected an escalation like what we have seen.’ This echoes back to the Bush administration, which s ‘No one in their wildest imagination could have imagined 9/11.’ Although anyone who knew the Muslim world and knew the Arab world, who knew the antipathies, was not surprised.”

But how can the polarization be remedied?

“You resolve it through thinking people speaking up, and the conversation not being dominated by the extremists,” Pintak offers. After 9/11, American media became what some may call ‘patriotic.’

“I don’t accept that. Patriotism also involves criticism. But certainly [the media was] waving the flag, being uncritical and unquestioning of US policy. All the studies of American media coverage show that very few voices, questioning voices, were given space in the media,” he says. Now, some Americans are starting to wake up to this fact. “Mainstream, national-level American reporters are now very aware of the role they played in driving this polarization. They really recognize now that they were used and likewise Arab reporters who gave voice to the extreme and ignored the middle ground for the most part, concentrating on the most sensational images, are now aware of their role in society and very aware of the criticism.

“If I sit in Al-Jazeera’s newsroom or Al-Arabiya’s newsroom, I am very impressed with the level of professionalism they bring to story selection,” Pintak points out.

The veteran journalist also makes a point of being involved in an ongoing dialogue between Arab and American reporters. One of his channels is a series Aspen University is conducting with leading reporters from the region, including names such as Al-Ahram’s Salama Ahmed Salama.

“At the last one we did an exercise where they came up with a fake story in Iraq. Arab reporters had to cover it as if they were American journalists and [vice versa]. It really brought up stereotypes we had of each other and of how we think the others are going to approach a story. It caused us to think through that different lens, the different prism. These things help the media to talk to each other and begin to be aware of ways to present a balanced and full picture. We are always going to report the news differently. Even though I spent most of my adult life overseas, if I’m approaching a story I am still going to approach it differently than an Arab, Indian, Pakistani or French reporter.

“The key is not to bring bias to that coverage,” he continues. “Of course I am going to bring my worldview. I’m going to report differently because I’m talking to a different audience and I need to educate them in different ways. The key is to be aware of how our biases and stereotypes somehow compartmentalize us.” et