Transcript
SHIBLEY TELHAMI: Many of you know that I have been doing polling in the Arab world in six countries, the same six countries over the past 5 years. In fact, I am in the middle of doing it in other countries as well, so this Lebanon poll is part of the six-country poll. So we are going to have results as well in the next couple of weeks coming from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Morocco, and the United Arab Emirates.
Some of this research is focused not only on attitudes on issues of foreign policy, domestic policies, regional policies, but also on the impact of the media on opinion for analytical academic study of the relationship between media and opinion in the Middle East. So there are a lot of media questions about which I will not be reporting today because the focus is not the media, but we will be releasing the media results in the next couple of weeks in terms of what people's habits are.
In Lebanon there are some interesting results. For one thing, I could tell you up front before I go through the poll that certainly there are differences within Lebanon's sects in terms of what they watch on television. The Christians tend to watch LBC as the number-one source for news. Muslims in general tend to watch Al-Jazeera, the Shia community particularly tends to watch Al-Jazeera, but also Al-Manar Television, Hizballah's television, and there are differences in the way they watch the news on television. I will be releasing that within the next couple of weeks, and will also show differences across time.
One of the interesting things about this project is that we are asking some of the same questions every year to see how views are changing. Those of you who know about polling know that this is really important because at any given time, one of the most interesting questions is how opinion has changed over time, so a lot of the questions that we ask are repeat questions from the previous year. But every year we put new questions on the table depending on the issues of the day, and this year, obviously, the Lebanon war was a very important issue, so we introduced new questions about Lebanon and Hizballah, not just in Lebanon, but also in the other countries in and of themselves.
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