Arab Media & Society

There are few media professionals in the Middle East who juggle as many commitments as Daoud Kuttab.  Director of the Institute of Modern Media at Al Quds University and a regular columnist for the Jordan Times and Jerusalem Post, perhaps his greatest achievement has been as founder and chief  of the Arab World’s first online community radio station AmmanNet. 

So what has online radio achieved in Jordan?  And where can it go from here?  Co-Editor and Publisher of Arab Media & Society finds out (to listen to this interview, click here).

Pintak: Daoud this station evolved from a purely Internet operation. Tell me about the origins.

Kuttab: Well it actually started as an experiment.  I was attending a conference in 2000 in Jordan with the International Press Institute and the Jordanian Minister of Information who was boasting that in Jordan the Internet is not censored, there are no proxies, anybody can do anything on the Internet.  And I knew that in Jordan private radio was not allowed so I said I’m going to start a radio station on the Internet. And I did and it was a big success. 

Jordan is very close to Palestine, and there are FM radio stations in Palestine, so we asked stations there to download some of our radio programs and re-broadcast them back on the FM frequency so people in Jordan could hear things about themselves. So we were kind of doing something illegal but in a legal way.

Pintak: So a bit of a pirate radio station?

Kuttab: No in the West Bank there are proper private FM radio stations that exist and so we used the geographical proximity of the West Bank to Jordan, and the fact that in the West Bank there are FM radio stations. So basically the Internet became a conduit for broadcasting or maybe for publishing radio programs online to send some of the programs we would re-broadcast back into the community.

Pintak: What kind of reaction did they get?

Kuttab: Well it was quite interesting.  I mean I don’t want to claim that the private stations or the audio-visual media law happened because of us, but certainly two years later, anybody who wanted to could apply for and get an FM licence in Jordan. Because basically what we were doing was we were exposing the monopoly that existed on FM stations while the Internet was free. And, so you know, there is talk in Jordan about members of the cabinet who are digital members and members who are analogue members referring to the more kind of open-minded ones and so our experiment was used as a reason to liberalize the media laws.

Pintak: What kind of programs were you broadcasting?

Kuttab: Well we began with news programming and we started community-based programming about society—we applied a theory that is kind of strange in the Middle East, we decided that even though our reach is global with the Internet our content had to be local. So we insisted that everything on our station had to be original, had to be authentic, had to be obviously honest and true and objective.  But we also wanted to concentrate on AmmanNet on issues of Amman.  Enough media is escaping local issues by covering regional and international news, but we didn’t want to do that.  So we insisted on local programming, local news, addressing local problems in the capital of Jordan.

Pintak: The criticism of the Al Jazeeras and the Al Arabiyas and the other satellite channels is that they are aggressively regional, that they are ignoring domestic issues in given countries.  So you are essentially the antidote to that.

Kuttab: I would say not only the Al Jazeeras and the Al Arabiyas but I would also say that the local, national stations are also quite regional.  I mean you can put on Jordan television or probably Egypt television and actually have the protocols of the president or the king. The majority of the news is often about Iraq or Palestine or about Lebanon. Because that’s an easy issue, it’s an issue there is consensus on and local issues are much more controversial and much more sensitive and so state-run media also does that.  And certainly the Al Jazeeras and the Al Arabiyas do that—they don’t focus in on what’s happening in Doha or in Dubai.  There’s not that much going on there, but they don’t really give a local perspective because I would say they are escaping to the regional issues.

Pintak: But yet the government-owned television channels, in response to the rise of satellite, are all talking about public-service broadcasting.  What does that mean and are they achieving anything like the community reporting you’re doing?

Kuttab: Look there’s certainly slow but sure understanding that local and national media can only compete with the transnational media by concentrating on local and national news. How much they’re doing this I question. How courageous they are in dealing with local issues, I question. They do understand that theoretically they have to do that.  My problem is that they haven’t really become public service broadcasting. They are giving lip-service to public service, they are still controlled by the prime minister’s office or by the palace or the President, and therefore the news still tends to be protocol news, or they become the media of the government in power rather than the community or the nation.