Transcript

SHIBLEY TELHAMI:   This actually is the seventh year of repeating some of the same questions in the same six countries. We started doing that in 2002. The project itself started well before 2002, actually in 2000 and 2001 prior to 9/11. It was really not driven by 9/11. It wasn’t even driven by public opinion as such.

This was an analytical project that was trying -- the whole idea of it was to accumulate enough data over time to analyze the changing relationship between the media environment in the region, particularly satellite television and then the rise of the Internet, and their impact on not only opinions of citizens in the world, but also notions of identity -- changing notions of identity. And I had some theoretical propositions about that. I wrote about it in the late 1990s. And we thought that we really need to study this empirically. We need to have some data. And it’s not enough to just do it at a snapshot one year. We have to have a lot of data to study it over time.

So we started doing that every year. We have a base set of questions that we repeat every year, and then we have new ones that are topical that we add that are of interest to the policy community or analytically interesting. What I present today is only a small part of what we get, because a lot of it, particularly media habits is extensive. And it's really used primarily so that we could do some statistical analyses and correlations over time. My intent is to have at least 10 years so that we can have sustained analysis. So it’s very important to put this in perspective. This is not just a snapshot. Here's public opinion.

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