In this chapter from Shibley Telhami’s new book, The World Through Arab Eyes: Arab Public Opinion and the Reshaping of the Middle East, Telhami looks at the impact of Al Jazeera — the Middle East’s largest news network — on the region’s changing media landscape.
By: Shibley Telhami | June 15, 2013
The Arab media explosion that recently has culminated in uprisings across the region springs from two interrelated sources: the growth of satellite television and the affordability of the receivers to the Arab masses, and the common language that Arabs share across state boundaries. Arabic unified a media market of some 350 million people in twenty-two countries and beyond.
Even before television, in the 1950s and 1960s there had been a dramatic increase in radio usage across the Arab world, especially after the rise of transistor and short-wave radios and their availability to the masses. The most striking and influential example was Sawt al-Arab Radio (“Voice of the Arabs”), sponsored by Egypt to spread Nasser’s Pan-Arabist message in the 1950s and 1960s. This station was so popular across the region that it presented real challenges to Nasser’s political opponents among the conservative Arab rulers in places like Saudi Arabia and Jordan, who attempted to jam the broadcasts.
Even Israel exploited the medium, especially after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, when its Arabic radio began broadcasting programs specifically aimed at Egyptians. Knowing that Nasser had prohibited popular songs and even soccer games following the war in favor of martial music and a more somber focus on preparation for a new war, the Israelis made sure to air the Egyptians’ favorite songs as a way of luring listeners to their political perspective. Radio, of course, was relatively easy to jam and governments worked to block threatening broadcasts, but its ultimate undoing as a primary source of news came with television’s power
By the early 1990s television had become king of the media, and each state had made sure it had its own TV stations as a way of building local identity and loyalty and as a means of controlling the flow of information to the public. In those days, average Arabs in most countries received their news from national nightly news broadcasts entirely controlled by the government. Viewers had to endure lengthy coverage of routine events, such as visits of rulers to a hospital or a village, before they got to serious news, which was filtered to protect the rulers and advance their immediate interests.
This would all begin to change before the twentieth century was out, but although Al Jazeera has become synonymous with a new world of Arab media change, it was not the pioneer. In the 1980s and 1990s, Saudi Arabia and wealthy members of the Saudi royal family took the lead by purchasing popular Arabic newspapers and distributing them across the region, and hiring some of the region’s most prominent journalists. They understood that their broader Arab consumer needed more news and more diversity, and they allowed greater coverage of Arab and international issues—although critical coverage of Saudi Arabia and its royal family remained taboo. They also pioneered new satellite stations, beginning with one called MBC, in the early 1990s; these reached mostly the elites, as satellite technology was expensive at that time. The overall effect of this Saudi-sponsored media was to show the potential for a larger media market and also the potential threats other governments could face from transnational media. This simultaneous sense of inspiration and threat is likely what inspired the emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad Bin Khalifa Al Thani, to start Al Jazeera (“Peninsula” in Arabic, referring to the Arabian Peninsula, of which both Qatar and Saudi Arabia are parts) in 1996… MORE