Democracy Now! speaks with Jamal Dajani, producer of the Peabody-winning Mosaic, which gathers news reports from around the Middle East.

An excerpt:

JAMAL DAJANI: Well, I mean, the idea was born after September 11, because what you see on corporate American media is basically sound bites. You don't get any real news coming out from the Middle East without the pundits telling their own spin around it, and so the idea was born in a sense that you have 280 million people living in 22 countries in the Middle East. The Middle East itself is not a monolith. You have over 130 different satellite stations currently operating out of the Middle East. So, what we wanted to do is bring a window to what those folks out there are watching on a daily basis. And that's basically what “MOSAIC” is all about.

AMY GOODMAN: How do you get it? How do you get these newscasts? I mean, you're not really digesting it. You're bringing excerpts of these reports from Lebanon TV, Jordan TV. Where do you get them from?

JAMAL DAJANI: Many are available on satellite that we receive, just download, you know, from the satellite. Others we have stories with shelf life. We ship over from our recording studio in Cairo. But basically, we have a small team, a hard-working team that monitors -- that monitor stories on a daily basis and in certain instances, we may have a show just going after one story and comparing how these different networks are reporting it, you know, from Israel to the Lebanese broadcasting, to the Iraqis and so forth. And sometimes we are, of course, event driven, so if you have something going on in Iraq, that's where our focus is going to be for that day.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And is the kind of programming that you are compiling, is it geared predominantly around issues in which the Arab world and let's say the United States or the West intersect, or do you also bring together some of the programming that deals with the domestic conditions in those countries, as well?

JAMAL DAJANI: Well, unfortunately, I mean, we do both, but unfortunately, with the events going on in Iraq, this is what has been dominating the news. I mean, we bring social, economical issues from time to time or stories, you know, about woman rights in Saudi Arabia or in Morocco, and so forth. But the show is really driven with the facts on the ground, and recently, as you are all aware, even in the corporate media here, the big story is Iraq or something happens in the Palestine-Israeli issue. Recently the events that were unfolding on the Lebanese front and in Syria, those were what we have been focusing on.

AMY GOODMAN: Jamal Dajani, tell us the difference. So, for example, the latest killing of the anti-Syrian journalist when he put the key in the ignition of his car in Beirut or, of course, just the latest developments in Iraq, what is different? Can you give us an example of a station that you're excerpting their newscast of?

JAMAL DAJANI: Well, like you mentioned before, you said there is a war of information going on. And this is actually -- there is a war of information going on between all these different networks. And it's driven by either sectarian or by the governments. For example, what you talked about the killing of the journalist in Lebanon, you have a war going on between the Christian-sponsored station like LBC, and Al-Manar, which is financed by Syria and Iran, and the Hezbollah station there, basically putting the blame on each other whether this was, for example, the Hezbollah are saying that this is a conspiracy by the Mossad and the United States to create a civil war in Lebanon and, of course, LBC is focusing on the Syrian involvement in silencing the people that are criticizing the government of Syria.