Christophe Ayad, Middle East specialist
Satellite dishes have sprouted on the rooftops of Aleppo, in Syria.
Outdoor televiewers in Cairo. Only around 10 per cent of Egyptians have access to satellite TV.
|
The major players in Arab satellite TV It was during the 1990-1991 crisis in the
Gulf that pictures from the sky burst in on the Arab world in a spectacular way.
As in other regions, the conflict brought CNN with it and showed up local coverage
as mediocre. |
Satellite
TV channels are making inroads on state-run monopolies and widening programme choice,
but the number of households equipped with dish receivers is still generally low
On October 21, 1999, Syrian security forces mounted an attack on the
house of President Hafez al-Assad’s brother Rifaat in Lattakieh. The latest of Syria’s
many political vicissitudes, the event was triggered by an interview with a former
U.S. ambassador to Jordan which had been broadcast on the Arab News Network (ANN),
a satellite TV channel run by Rifaat’s eldest son Sumar.
During the interview the ex-ambassador had expressed scepticism about the capacities
of the president’s son and heir Bashar to succeed his father. Earlier, in 1997, a
report on a reception given in Lattakieh by Rifaat in honour of Saudi Arabia’s Crown
Prince Abdullah had provoked the Syrian government’s wrath because it had violated
protocol and, even worse, had been broadcast on ANN.
Crumbling censorship
Whatever its real aim–information
or propaganda–satellite broadcasting has helped turn TV into a major factor in the
political life of a region which has never been noted for audiovisual pluralism.
ANN is only one of the players in this process.
On the 50th anniversary of what Arabs call the naqsa (disaster)–the founding of the
Israeli state in 1948 after the Arab defeat–Arab viewers of the Middle East Broadcasting
Corporation (MBC, see
box) were able to see the same
documentary film, made by Britain’s BBC, that the Israelis saw on their national
channel.
“The Jordanian government angrily denied the accuracy of a sequence in which King
Hussein was said to have warned Israel of the imminence of a war in October 1973,”
says Jon Alterman, a programme officer in the Research and Studies programme at the
U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP).
“The main thing was that they couldn’t censor it,” says Alterman. “In the long run,
the obstacles to the freedom to inform and be informed are gradually going to crumble.
The ability of governments to act as censors is weakening year by year, even if countries
like Egypt and Jordan have recently passed repressive press laws.”
Governments, he feels, will at least have to take account of public opinion in their
countries, even if they do not set up real democracies. “And those that hesitate
most about this will be left behind by the rest of the world.”
The success of the Qatar satellite TV channel Al-Jezeera is significant in this respect.
“It introduced discussions which showed a clash of contradictory opinions,” says
Alterman. Since it was started in 1997, Al-Jezeera has become a beacon of free expression
in the Arab world, thanks to the professionalism of its journalists, who once worked
in the BBC’s former Arab Service. And because Qatar is a small country, which is
very rich but has no major geopolitical interests to defend, it can afford to rub
its powerful neighbours up the wrong way and serve as a meeting-point for the Arab
world’s opposition politicians. The station has even brought Qatar regional prestige.
Is this an exception which proves the rule? Journalist Daud Kuttab does not share
this very “liberal” vision of steady progress towards democracy made possible through
free competition in the information market. Kuttab, who is highly respected in the
Arab world, was the first chairman of Palestinian Television but was soon dismissed
for his independent approach. He was successively jailed by the Israeli army and
the Palestinian Authority and now runs the Jerusalem Film Institute.
A two-speed information
society
He points out that many Arab
satellite channels are simply offshoots of state-run TV. “Most were set up just so
that governments could extend their influence beyond national borders. That’s why
they often only broadcast classical music and a screen showing pink flamingos, with
a small emblem or a flag in the top left corner of the screen. It’s also why they
spend more money on the technical side of broadcasting than on programming.”
Such channels are also the last place an independent Arab film-maker would go to
look for funding, he says. For cost or political reasons, programmes (animal films,
uncontroversial features, soap operas) are mostly bought in Europe and the United
States. This has a schizophrenic effect on viewers: the gap between their own environment
and the pictures they see on the screen is just as big whether they are looking at
a state-run national channel or satellite channels.
Kuttab is just as sceptical about the role of satellite channels in the emergence
of independent news reporting. He has seen no sign of this. Not long ago, a minister
of information told him “I can change and modernize as much as I want, but the first
item on the television news will always be the daily report on the president’s activities.”
This news programme will usually be broadcast on the satellite channels of this particular
state.
Kuttab also thinks that satellite channels are first and foremost powerful weapons
that some states and politicians can use against their neighbours or rivals. In fact,
he says, “even when the news they carry is better and more varied than on local channels,
the aim is more to harm their enemies than to inform the public.” Saudi channels,
for example, talk a lot about pluralism when neighbouring countries such as Yemen
are concerned, but say very little about Saudi internal politics.
The other danger, says Kuttab, is that “these channels create a two-speed information
society where you have people with access to information from abroad and the vast
majority who have to make do with official propaganda.” Alterman notes that the numbers
of households equipped to receive satellite TV are bound to increase but they are
still generally low. “In the Gulf, two-thirds of the population have satellite dishes,
but only 20 per cent in Palestine, Lebanon and Jordan, and only between 7 per cent
and 10 per cent of Egyptians.”
So in Egypt, the Arab world’s most populous country but also one of the poorest,
access to a choice of information is just one more privilege for the ruling class.
In a less serious vein, Egyptian TV viewers last summer could not see the matches
of the Confederations Cup, in which the Egyptian football team was playing, because
ART, a group of subscription-only satellite channels (see box), had bought exclusive
rights to screen the matches.
The rare attempts to ban satellite reception have not amounted to much. In 1994,
the Saudi authorities tried to do this, for commercial rather than political and
moral reasons (some satellite-transmitted films are seen as offensive to Islamic
morality). They were actually trying to promote the interests of cable operators
who were close to the royal family. Later the government took a more tolerant view
of satellite dishes. Today, Iraq is the only Arab country which has not entered the
era of satellite television.
It cannot be denied that satellite channels are having profound effects on Arab societies.
For example, they help to create what Alterman calls “a real basic identity”, based
on a common mental landscape and references that are transmitted by the new channels
all over the Arab world and thus transcend national frontiers. This identity is much
more sturdy than the one governments have hitherto tried to create by “brainwashing”.
Satellite channels are also a link between Arabs living in the region and the Arab
diaspora in the West.
Competition prises
open state-run channels
The appearance of a new kind
of audiovisual operator, albeit few and far between, has helped to transform the
media scene. “The competition has to keep up,” says Alterman. One example is MBC,
which “has clear links with the Saudi government but can no longer afford to appear
as the Voice of Riyadh if it wants to keep its viewers.”
The new satellite channels are more attractive and modern and have an impact on the
state monopolies. Douglas Boyd, who teaches in the University of Kentucky’s Communication
Department, says the lack of credibility of local media is the chief reason for the
popularity of satellite TV.
The competition from the sky has forced the state-run channels to open up and innovate.
The official Egyptian TV channel now screens a lot of talk shows which, though uncontroversial,
at least give an impression of public debate. Jordanian TV has also given air time
to the monarchy’s fiercest opponent, Laith Shbelat, rather than see him appear yet
again on Al-Jezeera.
“Even Syria has seen remarkable progress in its television services over the past
15 years,” says Nabil Dajani, a sociology professor at the American University of
Beirut. In Qatar, the ministry of information has simply been abolished.
“Paradoxically, it’s the interaction of conflicting interests, defensive government
policies and competition between various channels which has increased pluralism,”
says Boyd. “A biased and narrow pluralism but an embryonic pluralism all the same.”
Further information can be found in “TBS-Transnational
Broadcasting Studies”, the electronic journal published by the American University
in Cairo’s Adham Centre for Television Journalism: http://www.tbsjournal.com