Global Policy Forum

By Felicity Barringer

From a ground-floor office in a nondescript building in Washington, the United States government's newest radio station is sending a message to the Arab world:

"Oh kiss me, beneath the milky twilight, lead me on the moonlit floor, lift your open hand, strike up the band and make the fireflies dance . . ."

Then, as the American pop sounds of "Kiss Me" by the band Sixpence None The Richer fade, Arabic pop music kicks in. Among the featured artists is the Egyptian singer Amr Diab, who croons: "Habibi, Habibi, Habibi ya nour el-ain, Ya sakin khayali . . ." ("My darling, my darling, my darling, the light of my eyes, you live in my dreams . . .")

This is the sound of three-month old Radio Sawa: 85 percent pop music, 15 percent government-generated news, slickly packaged with market research in hand. To counteract the anti-American diatribes on the Middle East's airwaves, a senior American radio executive has persuaded Congress to use the simple syntax of the young and lovelorn to sell the United States to the youth of the Arab world.

Anyone who tunes in gets, every half-hour, a dollop of news about President Bush or developments in the Middle East. Three to five minutes later, the station goes back to backbeats.

Radio Sawa, whose name means "together" in Arabic, represents a sharp turn from the traditional, long-form news, analysis and cultural programming of the Voice of America, whose shortwave and AM broadcasts to the Arabic-speaking world have been eliminated to make way for the bubble-gum pop music of stars like Britney Spears and the Lebanese singer Rashid al-Majid.

With the approval of local governments, the station broadcasts in FM from four points in the Arab world: Amman, Jordan, whose radio signals reach Palestinians in the West Bank; Kuwait City; and Dubai and Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. The station's AM signals, from the Greek island of Rhodes, can reach all the way to Egypt.

Early, scattered reactions to the $35 million American broadcasting effort are mixed. People are listening — to the music, at least. If they do hear the news, it is not clear that they like it.

Ayman Bardawil, a Palestinian broadcaster with Al Quds Educational TV in Ramallah, in the West Bank, said the station's signal was hard to hear where he was but its music format, alternating Western and Arabic pop, is appealing.

"We have plenty of local stations for pop music — but it's only Arabic music," he said. "This one is unique. It's targeting young people who like to listen to both languages, the ones who are more educated and more cosmopolitan."

But he found Radio Sawa's news irritatingly America-centric.

"I am fed up with hearing everything through the American filters — how the president reacts to this and that and how the American government is reacting to whatever action is happening, rather than the action itself."

Friends, he said, suggest that it is a mouthpiece of the C.I.A.

However, Mr. Bardawil, who is past 30, is not part of the demographic Radio Sawa has set out to reach. Roxanne Contractor, 24, a Dubai resident looking for a marketing job, is closer to the target audience. She is of Indian descent and speaks English and Arabic.

"I like it a lot," she said. "First of all, there's no one talking, it's just continuous music. The Arabic music is songs you'd hear at clubs. The English is whatever's popular at the moment." She added, "There are no ads, and maybe one news bulletin."

The idea, according to Radio Sawa executives, is to layer in more news and public affairs programming over time — once the audience is built. Ms. Contractor is already part of that audience. But Radio Sawa's news will mean little to her. Like many of the middle-class professionals in Dubai — which is also a major media center — she speaks Arabic as a third or fourth language, and prefers to get her news in English from the BBC or CNN.

Norman J. Pattiz, chief executive of Westwood One, the largest radio company in the United States, and chairman of the Mideast subcommittee of the United States government's Broadcasting Board of Governors, has been the moving force behind Radio Sawa. And he is not disturbed to hear that a Palestinian dislikes the news he hears there. "Of course they will at first," he said. "They don't like America."

Mr. Pattiz had made plans for Radio Sawa long before the Sept. 11 attacks. He found his Congressional audience even more receptive afterward. His idea was to build an audience with commercial-type programming, then sell it a product — in this case, American news and American values.

He joined the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which oversees all nonmilitary international broadcasting, including the Voice of America, 19 months ago and soon started pushing for the commercial radio format. He sees Radio Sawa as "the future of the Voice of America," the prototype for future government radio — and perhaps, eventually, television — broadcasts.

The Voice of America's previous Arabic-language programming, which had been broadcast on shortwave, has been canceled; almost all the Arabic-language news staff has been dispatched to work at Radio Sawa.

As Mr. Pattiz put it in a recent interview: "What we wanted to do is go out and attract an audience. We're doing that. We wanted to create some good feelings about Americans with that audience. One only has to look at a Gallup poll to see feelings about America among Arabs at a low ebb."

Once that is accomplished, he said, "we'll start to present more and more programs, more and more dialogues, more and more discussions of policy, more interviews with people who are germane and important to that audience. We're in a building process, but ahead of schedule."

The idea that the Voice of America, whose core work for the last six decades has been broadcasting news, sports, entertainment and official government opinions, could be bypassed — or even eliminated — in favor of a headline news service — rankles deeply among the editorial employees who work one flight up from Radio Sawa. But few are willing to comment on the record about their discontent.

Myrna Whitworth, a longtime V.O.A. employee who was acting director from last June through November — a period when the service broadcast a report based on an interview with Mullah Muhammad Omar over the State Department's objections — applauded Mr. Pattiz's drive in getting friendly Arab governments to give the new service access to their FM frequencies.

But, Ms. Whitworth said, "I am concerned about the message. I look forward to the day when some of the other elements that have been promised are included in the format and when we are heard in more than a very few friendly Arab countries."

While it will take months, if not years, to determine if American news really can be marketed to an audience seeking pop music, Mr. Bardawil, the Palestinian, is skeptical.

"The news might prevent some people from listening to the music instead of the opposite being true," he said. "Everybody that I talked to said that it's a good station in terms of music but they are suspicious about the station in general. They don't like to be trapped with the music and get the American point of view."

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