SEDUCE THE EARS, and the hearts and minds will follow. Such is the thinking behind Radio Sawa, a jaunty new US-funded Arabic language radio station that is striving to counter deep anti-American sentiment in the Middle East.

At first the station sounds like any other pop music channel. In a typical hour, 50 minutes might be taken up with Jennifer Lopez, Britney Spears, Lionel Richie and the occasional Arab superstar such as Amr Diab.

It’s the other 10 minutes that show the difference. Dramatic jingles separate punchy items of news, delivered in Arabic, from Washington studios.

Sawa, which means “together” in Arabic, is slick, professional, commercial-free and broadcasts 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

The pop station represents a key change in tactics. The US Administration has shut down the serious, occasionally stodgy Arabic service of the Voice of America. Radio Sawa’s energetic young news director, Mouafac Harb, says of his station: “In Arabic, we call it ‘non-yawning programming’.” Yawning programming, by implication, was what was provided by the VOA, which had less than 2 per cent penetration in the region.

“You have to make the news fast-paced, to the point, the kind that would appeal to a young audience,” adds Harb, a 35-year-old Lebanese American and the former Washington bureau chief of Al Hayat, the respected pan-Arab newspaper.

Inevitably, Radio Sawa is being called “pop-aganda”. Certainly the lexicon is different from that used on traditional Arab stations. Its listeners hear terms such as “suicide bombings” instead of “martyrdom operations”. But will the station achieve its aim of helping to shift public opinion away from fundamentalism and anti-Americanism? Critics suggest that young Arabs will take the sound but discard the agenda.

Radio Sawa’s music-driven format is heavily marketresearched and tailored specifically to appeal to young people in the Arab world, where 60 per cent of the population — some 300 million people — is under 30. Response from its audience is solicited keenly.

“I wanna tell that your programs are sooo wonderful, cause you have a balance between programs,” gushes a typical e-mail sent to the station by a listener in Iraq, where Radio Sawa is said to be providing stiff — and unwelcome — competition to two popular channels run by Saddam Hussein’s eldest son, Uday.

Planning for Sawa was under way before the September 11 attacks, but these made the project more urgent. It began broadcasting in March, and since then it has worked hard to make itself available throughout the Arab world, using FM where possible but also AM, short-wave, digital audio satellite and the internet.

It is received on FM in Kuwait, Jordan, the West Bank, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Qatar. A powerful new transmitter in Cyprus beams it on medium-wave to Egypt, the Arab world’s most populous country, the Levant, and parts of Saudi Arabia. Listeners in Baghdad tune in to transmissions from Kuwait.

“There’s a media war going on in the Middle East,” says Norman Pattiz, chairman of the Middle East committee of the US Broadcasting Board of Governors, an agency of the US Government, and creator of Radio Sawa. “The weapons of that war include hate, radio and television, incitement to violence, government censorship, journalistic self-censorship and disinformation. And up until now, the US has not had a horse in this race.”

Anti-American sentiment has led to an unofficial boycott of US brands in some Arab countries, and there are those who believe that Radio Sawa is another US product which should be blacklisted. “It seeks to brainwash and instil American ideas in the minds of the rising generation,” complained Al-Ra’i newspaper in Jordan.

Those at Sawa insist it is not a propaganda station, even though it is US-funded. Congress allocated it $35 million (£22.5 million) for the fiscal year 2002, including $16.4 million for the one-off capital costs of transmitters. The Bush Administration has requested $21.7 million for the station for the next fiscal year, including $5.4 million for the operational costs of transmitter stations.

But, as The Washington Post observed recently, Sawa is “non-ideological, not even identifiably American” and is “designed as entertainment rather than public posture”.

The aim, says Pattiz, is “to have an American voice in the region so that people can listen to an interpretation of our policies, of our culture, of our people, from our own lips, and then they can decide”. The Broadcasting Board of Governors acts as “a firewall between the independence of our journalists and the pressures that may be put upon us by the State Department or the Administration”.

Harb adds that “media consumers” in the Middle East are “highly sophisticated, very much politicised and you cannot try to play with the news. You just tell it the way it is”.

Even critics concede that Sawa is popular and that its audience is growing fast. Independent research showed that it was the favourite station of more than 50 per cent of listeners in its target audience. The question is, do listeners tune in merely for the music and switch off for the newscasts?

Contrasting styles: Radio Sawa and Radio Damascus

Some excerpts from news bulletins broadcast on the same day last month:

1. On the death of a Palestinian in Nablus.
Radio Sawa: “A Palestinian is killed by Israeli gunfire in Nablus.”
Radio Damascus: “Despite the curfew imposed by the Israeli occupation army on Nablus for more than 100 days, tension prevailed today over the area of Nablus where a Palestinian youth, aged 15 years, was martyred and five others were wounded in various confrontations between Palestinian civilians and the occupation army.”

2. On the Iraqi diplomatic offensive in the Gulf by Iraq’s foreign minister, Naji Sabri.
Radio Sawa: “Sources said Iraq was probably asking the Gulf states not to allow the US to use their military installations as launching points for attacks on Iraq.”
Radio Damascus: “Diplomatic and political efforts continue against the US’s insistence to wage an aggression against Iraq. Iraqi foreign minister, Naji Sabri, said the US stand is a dangerous threat to the future of the region.”