Arab Media & Society

Camera-phone videos of Egyptian police torturing suspects posted on YouTube.com. Prostitution and masturbation discussed on satellite TV. The Iranian president reaching out to Arabs on his own blog.

The times, as Bob Dylan sang in another context, are a’ changin’. Across the Middle East, new television stations, radio stations and websites are sprouting like incongruous electronic mushrooms in what was once a media desert. Meanwhile newspapers are aggressively probing the red lines that have long contained them.

Still, Arab journalists are jailed, assaulted or even killed on an almost daily basis,  as reported in the documents to which we link at right.

Here in Cairo, it is sometimes hard to keep up with it all and so I shudder to think what it’s like for researchers around the world. That is precisely why we have created this new online publication.

Actually, it is not, strictly speaking, “new.” Arab Media & Society is the latest incarnation of the Journal of Transnational Broadcasting Studies, which has been the pre-eminent publication covering satellite broadcasting in the Middle East and broader Islamic world since 1998.

When TBS Journal was founded two years after the launch of Al Jazeera, satellite TV was the story. Newspapers were moribund. Internet penetration was negligible. Media deregulation was an alien concept.

Now, there are 263 free-to-air (FTA) satellite television stations in the region, according to Arab Advisors Group. That’s double the figure as of just two years ago.

The impact of the pan-Arab satellite revolution is today felt at every level of Arab society – and in every form of media. Which is why Arab Media & Society is the logical incarnation of TBS Journal, covering not just television, but all forms of media and their interaction with society-at-large, from politics and business to culture and religion, as well as the way in which Arab media change resonates in the broader Muslim world.

Arab satellite television is not responsible for creating the Internet (Al Gore takes credit for that…). But it has inspired everyone from the young would-be journalists in our classrooms here at the American University in Cairo to the bloggers about whom we write in this first issue, and who are the pioneers of a new form of activist citizen engagement in the Arab and Muslim worlds.

Arab satellite television did not invent Arab journalism. But the largely unfettered approach it champions has changed how many Arab newspaper journalists view their own role.

And while not a single Arab head of state has been forced from office by satellite television, it has clearly impacted the way Arab leaders deal with their populations and how governments interact.

A comment written by founding editor S. Abdallah Schleifer in the first issue of TBS Journal in 1998 underlines just how far we have come: “There have been recurrent fears that the radical Islamic fundamentalist movement in Lebanon, Hizbullah, would launch a satellite station devoted to undermining the moderate Arab governments.”

Not long after, Hizbullah’s Al Manar arrived on the scene. Its raison d’être may not be the undermining of Arab regimes, but its coverage of last summer’s Israel-Hizbullah conflict galvanized audiences across the Arab world – many of whom switched to Al Manar from Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya – generating widespread support for Shiite Hizbullah among all Arabs, Sunni and Shia alike.

Public opinion forced Saudi Arabia and the Gulf regimes into reversing their policies, shifting from criticism of Hizbullah early in the war to ultimately praising Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah as an Arab hero.

Think about that: Arab governments changing their foreign policy in response to public opinion driven by the media. The public is talking back and the media is listening to them. And vice versa. Nasser must have rolled over in his grave.