Views from the Middle East: Public Opinion in the Arab World

Transcript

SHIBLEY TELHAMI: Let me just put this public opinion poll in some perspective. This is an academic poll. I've been doing polling in the Arab world for about 10 years. This is not intended really so much for any political purposes. Initially this project started before 9/11 and it was intended to look at the new media phenomenon, the information revolution in the mid-1990s, that emerged and to see whether it's having any impact on the way people perceive the world, their opinions, but also notions of identity. And so we started doing some polling particularly to trace what people watch on television, how often they watch it, and to examine what has been termed the Al Jazeera phenomenon, but really all the stations that have come out since particularly satellite television, and in recent years we started also measuring Internet use. So now this year for example we have probably the most significant segment of the public using the Internet that is going to enable us to do statistical analysis. The whole idea behind the project was to have -- we know that really the most interesting part of public opinion is the demographic analysis and also analysis of change over time that allows you ultimately to look back and make an evaluation, so any shortcut is interesting in and of itself, but really the big analysis is when you look back and try to analyze this data over time which is what we're doing.

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