This is a part of a jam-packed, lively breakout session of the Global Media Forum yesterday, entitled “Terrorists Online”. It was moderated by Yassin Musharbash, Editor, SPIEGEL-ONLINE. The panel consisted of:

Dr. Ammar Bakkar, Chief Editor of Alarbiya.net und Head of New Media at MBC
Prof. Dr. phil. Oliver Hahn, Centre for Advanced Study in International Journalism, Journalism Institute of Dortmund University
Loay Mudhoon, Editor of Qantara.de (standing in for Mohammed Dawoud, Head of Al Jazeera.net)
Dr. Amr Hamzawy, Senior Associate for Media and Politics of the Middle East at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington

The video above is of Dr. Amr Hamzawy’s presentation (who’s one of my favorite political commentators). His presentation was not strictly about terrorism, but about the diversity of Arab discourse online today, and the emergent discussions within extremist sites themselves.

I couldn’t capture all of the three hours of the session which included very interesting presentations. Dr Bakkar talked from his background of doing online content research and his work at Alarabiya.net. That site receives around 100,000 user comments a day. Moderating this amount of user commenting is a challenge in itself.

Dr Hahn made a very interesting analysis of the production values and visual language used by Al-Qaeda videos, concluding that they basically use a typically American TV presentation style in their directing and footage, as well as an ever more sophisticated production level.

Part of the discussion are in the following video.

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