Arab Media & Society

Crunching the Numbers, Breaking the News

Progress and Challenges for Financial Journalism in the Arab World

New Arab media have brought the world some dramatic images: one videoclip, for example, shows an Egyptian man, naked from the waist down, being sodomized with a stick by a police officer while other officers watch, another shows an Iranian woman shot dead in an anti-government protest in Tehran, and Al Jazeera television broadcasts audio tapes of a man purported to be Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

Images such as these have dominated discussions and studies about the media scene in the Middle East over the last decade. Debates have focused mainly on the role of the Internet and satellite television stations, especially Al Jazeera in Qatar, in breaking down government controls over news. The discussions, however, have so far largely overlooked another area that has seen remarkable progress in the region during roughly the same period, namely financial journalism.

The explanation for the apparent neglect is easy to find: in a region largely dominated by absolute monarchies and autocratic governments, factors that give citizens greater access to information and stimulate the demand for political freedoms are always interesting to watch and analyze. In the case of Iran, for example, citizen journalists (ordinary people using their mobile phone cameras and sending reports through Twitter and social networking Web sites such as Facebook) became a major source of news when Tehran banned reporters from going out on the streets.

Another reason is that such stories appeal to a wide audience in the West and in the region and are therefore more likely to stir debate. Financial news, on the other hand, is highly technical and appeals to fewer people. Even reporters find it difficult to write about complex matters such as bank bailouts and derivatives.

'Just Feed Them Pabulum'