Arab Media & Society

Local Channels flourishing, Pan-Arab stations waning

Soft Content to Prevail: “News” Give in to “Sports” and “Movies”

The Arab media scene in the last few years of the first decade of the third millennium has totally changed from what we had seen in the first half of the same decade.

Pan-Arab channels seem to have given up their place as the most viewed TV channels to national (local) channels. In parallel, news channels seem to have lost their former glamor, unable to compete against the ever-increasing number of sports and movie channels.

Channels such as Qatar’s Al Jazeera and Saudi Arabia’s Al Arabiya no longer influence Arab audiences in the way they did until two years ago. On the other hand, recently launched channels such as Al Hayat 1, 2 and 3 of Egypt (launched 2008), Modern Sport, Moga Comedy, Panorama Drama 1 and 2 seem to be thriving.

Similarly, the TV program once considered the best in the Arab World, Al Jazeera's "Al-Ittijah Al-Mu'akes" ("The Opposite Direction"), seems to have lost its appeal for viewers. In contrast, the talk shows doing well in Egypt are "Ninety Minutes", hosted by Motazz Al-Demerdash on the private Egyptian station Al-Mehwar, "El-Bet Betak" hosted by Mahmoud Saad on the Egyptian state-owned television’s Channel One, and "Al-Ashera Masaan" hosted by Mona Al-Shazly on the private Egyptian channel Dream 2, in addition to “Al-Qahira Al-Youm” hosted by Amr Adib on the private coded channel Al-Youm of Orbit network.

Direct Causes: “The Egyptian Solution”

Several causes, direct and indirect, are behind this significant change and the most important of those are related to decisions taken by Egyptian and Saudi media actors.

Let’s begin with what we can call “the Egyptian Solution” to what the Egyptian government is presumed to have considered a problem.

Egypt has long been unable to counter the effects of Al Jazeera, which ever since its launch in Doha in 1996 is widely seen to be advancing an agenda unfavorable to existing Arab regimes including Egypt, a leading country in the Arab region. In the late 1990s, when Safwat el-Sherif (Minister of Information 1980-2004) was the Egyptian government's chief media policy maker and executive, the country had up to nine terrestrial local public channels and up to eight satellite channels, in addition to eight educational channels. Those 25 or so state-owned channels, even combined, were failing to counteract the impact of Al Jazeera.

Egypt, despite its large population of some 80 million people, has failed to launch a news channel to challenge Al Jazeera, which is based in a country of about one million. Egypt knows well that it does not have the financial resources to do that job. And even if it had the resources, it would not have launched such a channel because that would have meant playing in the very court in which Al Jazeera excels, with unpredictable results.