Arab Media Moguls

Naomi Sakr, Jakob Skovgaard-Petersen, Donatella Della Ratta

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781784532772
• eBook ISBN: 9780857737472
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Television

Transformations in the Arab media landscape are a key element in the regional dynamics of political change. Where do the private owners of Arab media outlets stand on the scene? What part, if any, have they played in weakening dictatorships, countering sectarianism and political polarisation, and reforming business practices in the Arab world? Arab Media Moguls charts the rise of some leading investors and entrepreneurs in Arab media, examining their motives, management styles, financial performance and links to political power. Responding critically to scholarship on Western moguls, this book uncovers the realities of risk and success for Arab media potentates and billionaires.

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Approaches to Exploring
Media–Politics Connections in the Arab
World

Naomi Sakr

Political leaders continue to ascribe considerable influence to television news. Despite the proliferation of digital media outlets and the accompanying fragmentation of audiences that characterised the early years of the twenty-first century, this was also a period when governments of leading world powers deemed it worthwhile to channel more state funds into overseas broadcasting, not less. By end-2006 France was due to have launched a joint public–private television news network called France 24, aimed at helping to express French views and values to an international audience. Russia Today, a state-funded television channel, went on air in English in December 2005 to broadcast news from a Russian perspective around the world. In the preceding months the BBC World Service, funded by the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, had announced its intention to launch a television channel in Arabic during 2007, thereby entering a market where the US-backed Al-Hurra TV and the German public broadcaster Deutsche Welle were already active. Chief among the declared motives behind these initiatives was the desire to counter the influence of existing channels (CNN and BBC World in the case of France 24; Al-Jazeera Satellite Channel in the case of Al-Hurra) or maintain a key position in world media (in the case of the BBC). Al-Jazeera, itself a trigger for new US and European television programming in Arabic, responded in kind with Al-Jazeera English, which underwent prolonged and costly preparations for start-up during 2005–6.

Ultimately, the rationale that motivates governments to use media as an arm of foreign policy shares some of the same assumptions that they rely on to rationalise censorship. The idea that ‘hearts and minds’ can be won by providing television coverage of certain issues in one case, or silencing coverage of certain issues in the other, downplays the extent to which individuals and communities form opinions and prioritise issues based on their own lived experience, cultural knowledge, expectations and interpretive frames of reference.¹ When viewers’ lived reality includes personal experience, even at second hand, of foreign policy or military measures that directly contradict media messages from the same source, the messages are inevitably undermined. The credibility problem that ‘attends the US as a promoter of democracy in the [Middle East] region’ is a case in point,² with negative implications for the potential influence of Al-Hurra TV. Jacques Chirac, as French president, suggested in 2005 that France 24 would place France at the forefront of a ‘global battle of images’.³ Yet no struggle for influence and impact can be conducted at the level of images alone. Even those who argue strongly that media influence matters, and is traceable, also acknowledge the relevance of viewers’ personal experience and the need to be aware of diversity and ‘resistance’ in audience responses.⁴ Moreover, television viewing is essentially voluntary. The more choice viewers have, the more they are able to switch to programmes that they find least objectionable in terms of their own politics and priorities. Indeed, according to one survey of several decades of research, the accumulated findings confirmed that the average audience member ‘pays relatively little attention, retains only a small fraction, and is not the slightest bit overloaded by the flow of information or the choices available among the media and messages’.⁵

Long-standing arguments highlighting audience resistance to the intended messages of audiovisual texts suggest that persuasion via television is likely to have mixed results. It may carry more weight with viewers when media accounts of distant happenings cannot be checked against the immediate environment, but even then the risk of dissonance is ever present.⁶ By the same token, however, evidence that audiences retain little of what they watch implies that it does matter what they see. This book starts from the premise that the processes involved in media influence are complex and that the volume of scholarly research into the influence of television and the Internet in Arab countries is still very limited by comparison with that on Europe and the US. While the book’s authors are keenly interested in the link between media and participatory politics, their research findings illuminate the complexities of that relationship in the Arab context, especially in the field of transnational media. It was, for example, never to be expected that a small margin of freedom of expression, when limited solely to satellite television and the Internet, would simply trigger political reform. Thus it was no surprise that political liberalisation in Arab states was still fragile and faltering nearly a decade after some observers started to celebrate the supposedly democratising potential of new media in the Arab world. Yet nor was it possible to analyse notable political events of 2005 – including Egyptian, Iraqi, Lebanese, Palestinian or Saudi elections for various tiers of government, or protest demonstrations in Cairo or Beirut – without invoking references to Arab media coverage as integral to an understanding of how and why the events took place. In other words, as the coming chapters will show, there is plenty to be said about ways in which changes in the Arab media are related to political change. Where differences arise is over how that relationship is perceived, interpreted and understood.

CAUTIONARY RESULTS OF AUDIENCE RESEARCH

Perceptions of the media–politics link have been hampered to date by a paucity of research data on audience responses to overtly political content. Some detailed studies, such as those by Lila Abu-Lughod, Christa Salamandra and others, have provided insights mainly into the reception of drama series, including examples of viewers rejecting didacticism and misrepresentation.⁷ These insights notwithstanding, Jon Alterman was justified in writing, in an afterword to a book of essays dealing with most aspects of Al-Jazeera other than its viewership, that ‘we know shockingly little about what the people of the Middle East watch, and how they interpret that information’.⁸ Advertisers, who have long bemoaned an absence of credible ratings for channels and programmes, voiced their dissatisfaction again at the Arab and World Media conference organised by the Arab Thought Forum and Dubai Press Club in December 2005.⁹ But, as indicated by Alterman and by the richness of findings by Abu-Lughod and others, numbers alone would not fill the knowledge gap. The expansion of political content in Arabic on television and the Internet during the late 1990s and early 2000s was not matched by a corresponding volume of ethnographic studies of relevant user responses, perhaps because of the same combination of official and informal constraints that held back most types of public opinion polling until the early 2000s.¹⁰ Difficulties encountered by the authors of the 2003 and 2004 editions of the Arab Human Development Report (AHDR) illustrate the general problem. For the 2003 edition the AHDR team tried to gather data about knowledge acquisition from fellow academics; they received answers from just seven Arab countries, with the requisite number of respondents taking part in only three.¹¹ For the 2004 edition the team tried to commission opinion polls on issues related to freedom of opinion, expression and association in seven countries, but were eventually able to do so in only five.¹² With the voices of ordinary television audiences still barely audible, and with only a relatively short time having elapsed since satellite broadcasting and the Internet became prominent elements in Arab politics, pronouncements about new media influence have too often been limited to observations about causality that are broadly positivist in character but without being grounded in empirical research.

Where satellite television is concerned, these observations sometimes view its contribution in terms that can be reduced to either ‘good’ or ‘bad’. A United States Institute of Peace (USIP) study, published in 2005, opted for an assessment in the latter category, based on a notion of objective ‘reality’ that the study’s authors seemed to present as fixed and unquestionable, not something that depends on who you are and how things appear to you. They wrote:

Arab audiences watch the news through a prism of individual and collective humiliation and resentment. To cater to those audiences, media portray the distorted reality created by this prism; and to compete with each other, they exaggerate the distortion. […] To ignore or somehow justify their [i.e. the new satellite channels’] lies and inflammatory reporting as incidental to doing business in their political environment amounts to gross relativism.¹³

While such a judgement may suit certain political purposes, its notions of ‘distortion’ and ‘exaggeration’ close off the avenues to understanding that would be opened up by ‘thick description’, of the kind envisaged by Clifford Geertz. For Geertz, ‘culture is not…something to which social events, behaviours, institutions or processes can be causally attributed; it is a context, something within which they can be intelligibly – that is thickly – described’.¹⁴ Far from dismissing the task of deconstructing the ‘prism’ through which audiences watch television news as misguided relativism, researchers interested in Arabic-speaking audiences would see this as part of their work. Geertz proposed that ‘understanding a people’s culture exposes their normalness without reducing their particularity’.¹⁵

Marc Lynch makes more of a concession to the need for thick description in his assessment of what he calls the Arab satellite channels’ ‘democratizing power’. Unlike USIP, Lynch is optimistic about these channels’ influence on Arab politics. Despite warning that television talk shows alone cannot produce ‘democratic transformations’, because they cannot substitute for the hard work of political organisation and negotiation, he nevertheless argues strongly that political talk shows have had two beneficial long-term ‘transformative effects’: they have helped to build ‘the foundations for a pluralistic political culture by affirming and demonstrating the legitimacy of disagreement’ while also ‘eviscerat[ing] the legitimacy of the Arab status quo’.¹⁶ Referring to thoughtful panel debates, rather than the stormy head-to-head confrontations which initially attracted attention to Al-Jazeera, Lynch suggests that these are helping Arab satellite television to ‘refashion the political terrain’ in a way that should be the focus of more research.¹⁷ Here again, however, sustained audience narratives remain conspicuous by their absence, replaced by the assumption that voices heard in public represent those that remain unheard. Bold assessments of a causal link between television content and public opinion¹⁸ would be more convincing if backed by evidence that opinion polls alone are unable to capture – about how diverse groups in Arab countries really regard such matters as pluralism, legitimacy, political reform and media representations of dissent.

Indeed, the audience research work in the present volume raises serious doubts about the kinds of generalisation that can be made regarding television programming as either a reflection of, or an influence on, what large sections of the population think. Imad Karam’s path-breaking study of youth audiences reveals just how marginalised members of this age group still feel. Bombarded with music channels and generous helpings of adult advice, young people in Arab countries are little closer to finding a voice either in public or in private in the age of satellite television than they were before. Dina Matar’s chapter on Palestinians in the diaspora shows how members of this community feel different from other Arabs. Participants in her research include some who turn to news for confirmation of their identity, but others who harbour strong suspicions about possible covert political and economic agendas of Arab television channels. Matar discovers that, where media create polarised contexts of ‘us’and ‘them’, her respondents tend towards defensive and essentialising reactions. Importantly, however, they turn to a wide range of sources for news. This choice of viewing offers alternatives to polarised media contexts, with the result that members of the diasporic audience seem to move continuously between essentialising and more open positions. Matar states that ‘that movement challenges assumptions about the emergence of particularistic identities that are increasingly common’ in popular media and political discourse.

The rarity of studies like those of Matar and Karam is highlighted in Tarik Sabry’s chapter, which peers into the void where a nascent project of Arab cultural studies should be. Sabry probes a possible set of explanations for why it is that Arab scholars currently take cultural imperialism simply as a given, discerning no need for empirical enquiry into the ways in which imperialism and its aftermath have affected the contemporary ‘ordinary’ and ‘everyday’. He finds that intellectuals tend to conflate past and present, leading to disdain for the culture of the tellingly named ‘Arab street’ and blindness to the need for a coherent field of cultural studies that engages with lived experience today. In the absence of a legitimated space for the study of contemporary culture, Sabry warns that current modes of thinking risk ‘masking the very dynamics of imperialism’ that an effective anti-imperialist project would want to understand.

MEDIA, POLICY-MAKING AND VESTED INTERESTS

Ideas about media influence are sometimes framed in terms of the so-called ‘CNN effect’. In this approach, the spotlight switches away from media influence on the general public, towards policy-makers and their responsiveness to media accounts of situations and events, such as those provided by the Atlanta-based satellite channel CNN during and after the 1991 Gulf War. Precisely speaking, the core of the debate around the CNN effect relates to whether the media are able to ‘influence governments to pursue military intervention during humanitarian crises’, thereby overriding long-standing principles of non-intervention and state sovereignty.¹⁹ More loosely, the implication is that, whatever their influence on public opinion, the media can bring pressure to bear on those in power to change their policies. The authors who coined the term ‘Al-Jazeera effect’ did not use it to probe the precise dynamics of media and high-level policy-making in the Middle East.²⁰ Nevertheless, the potential for representations via the Arab media to influence the decisions of Arab political leaders is an important issue to be addressed. If it could be shown that the existence of media narratives and images of war, conflict, angry crowds, or even just some forms of media discourse, had an identifiable impact on policy in their own right, then some of the grander claims made for new Arab media might carry weight. Dale Eickelman, for example, has written that new communications media are ‘turning the Arab street into a public sphere in which greater numbers of people, and not just a political and economic elite, will have a say in governance and public issues’.²¹ The point about an observation such as this lies in the fact that its author refers to ‘a say in governance’, not ‘a say about governance’. The distinction is important, because most evidence suggests that the alliances and priorities of Arab ruling elites influence the shape and orientation of the Arab media, so that editorial content is ultimately attributable not to people outside the elite but to political agendas that reflect patterns of elite ownership and control. Thus the argument can be made that it is change caused by divisions and realignments among ruling elites that surfaces via the Arab media landscape, rather than media content that triggers political change.²²

The question of how far media practitioners work – knowingly or not – to the agenda of governments and politicians, rather than in the service of the electorate, is a perennial subject of investigation in the general field of political co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Author
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Note on Sources, Citations and Transliteration
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Approaches to Exploring Media–Politics Connections in the Arab World
• 2. Cultures of TV News Journalism and Prospects for a Transcultural Public Sphere
• 3. Television and Public Action in the Beirut Spring
• 4. Idioms of Contention: Star Academy in Lebanon and Kuwait
• 5. Arab Internet Use: Popular Trends and Public Impact
• 6. Satellite Television: A Breathing Space for Arab Youth?
• 7. Democracy and the Media in Palestine: A Comparison of Election Coverage by Local and Pan-Arab Media
• 8. Palestinians, News and the Diasporic Condition
• 9. Crafting the Arab Media for Peace-building: Donors, Dialogue and Disasters
• 10. In Search of the Arab Present Cultural Tense
• Notes
• Bibliography