KUWAIT CITY: The Arab media has often been described in the West as chaotic, unpredictable, erratic and impossible to define for its divergent views on single issues, according to an expert on the Arab media. Dr Adel Iskander, a Canadian scholar of the Middle East media made the statement during a lecture on "Breaking media barriers: Intercultural communication between the West and the Arab World" Monday at the Aware Center in Surra. The lecture discussed ways of bringing down communication barriers between the East and the West -- the Middle East and the whole world in particular -- that prevent contacts in intercultural communication between the Arab world and the West. The Arab world, he said, is an incredibly strategic area not only geographically but economically, historically and politically as well and is a confluence of many different forces at the crossroad of many different civilizations where the stakes are incredibly high from the dawn of civilization until at present.
Which explains why, he said, the world at large, predominantly Western colonial powers, have been quite obsessed with the Middle East on broadly different levels and for various reasons. He said that when broadcasting began in the 1920s around the world, the first attempt at intercultural, multi-linguistic communication started with the establishment of Radio Bari in Fascist Italy, which built a significant following among those who had access to electronic communication (via shortwave radio), in those days. Radio Bari, he said, was the first ever to broadcast in the Arabic language on the electronic radio and was followed shortly after by others like the BBC World Service, the Voice of America and many others and from there, the competition began.
The Middle East, he said, was not known for any indigenous communications project. Broadcast from the area started only in the late 1940s and the early 50s which mostly catered to the intelligentsia with the press considered the playground of the elite in Arab society then. He spoke of the renaissance in the Arab press in Egypt and Levant (including Lebanon, Syria and Palestine) as well as the Moroccan and Algerian adventures in the field at the turn of the last century; for the most part however, little of that has been transferred to the broadcast realm.
Resulted
This resulted in the region left hopelessly behind the lagging interest in the communication realm up until the 1950s where indigenous experiments in broadcasting were mostly dominated, almost entirely, by state governments. He said that government influence in broadcasting in the Middle East region is very significant and almost omnipotent. A fact that resulted in the Arab voice losing credibility and repute among Arab audiences because of its failure to meet basic standards of accuracy and accountability. As a result, he said, the first major experiment in Arabic language broadcasting from the region disintegrated and was dissolved, soon to be replaced by another era of significant dependence on Western programming from the mid 1960s until the early 90s.
That was the time when the Voice of America became a significant player with the Voice of Monte Carlo another major player among the various other broadcasters that serviced the region. Arab broadcasters then, he said, were not considered particularly reliable especially in conflict situations, citing his experience -- in Kuwait where he has lived for sometime during the Iraqi invasion when he had to rely exclusively on foreign programming in the form of radio contacts from outside the Arab world to be able to understand and comprehend what was happening in his backyard.
The 1990s, according to him, became a major turning point almost a revolutionary renaissance, in Arab broadcasting partly because of the increase in investments in satellite programming, that saw the rise of MBC, Nilesat and other Egyptian satellite channels, and the growing competition between various political polarities in the Arab world led to a competition for audiences, content and dominion; territorial dominion as well.
Broadcasting then was transferred to the TV realm and became a hotly contested environment; and out of all that came the first indigenous 24-hour all news station Al Jazeera which became a trend setter. Al Jazeera, he said, is considered the most influential voice in the Arab world in the eyes of the West. In the 1970s, he said, there was debate among communication scholars and ministers of information across the globe about the disproportionate power possessed by the global north and the global west of all data. The debate in the 1970s, he said, happened to coincide with the rise of the Non-aligned Movement, nations and states that refused to be polarized by the choice between the capitalist United States and the Soviet communist regime.
Media
The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) helped produce a media communication regime called the "New World Information and Communication Order" which opened a debate in the UN over the distribution content of information. Countries from predominantly third world or developing countries looked at the media regime showed a very clear imbalanced that favored nations in the north and most are relying predominantly on content from the West, and this has to change, he said; the unidirectional flow of information from north to south, and west to east has to change, he added.
NAM, according to him, started instituting policies that would regulate content distribution in their respective nations.
Canada, as a living example of that, stands out for articulating a popular cultural identity for all Canadians which he said doesn't exist elsewhere.
The New World Information and Communication Order however, soon collapsed because of the difficulty in ensuring standardization across the world and what remained of it were very small, not so influential laws in some countries but not in others. The Arab world experienced a revival in the 1980s with the Saudis spending more money and with the help of the US Army Corps of Engineers built a lot of transmitters and satellite stations and the entire Arab world starting from Gulf and northwards across the region, began investing in the media. The media however, was predominantly government controlled with broadcasters offering bland, mundane and repetitive public relations-style press releases about what was happening in their respective societies. Kuwait, he said, was one unique exception. The Kuwaiti media experienced liberalization in the mid-80s in a way that cast it quite significantly aside from the status quo across the region.
Opened
The Kuwaiti media opened up its field ahead of the rest in the region and was the first to present perspectives on previously taboo issues from social, cultural and political and this, he said, has a lot to do with the importation of journalistic cadres from around the Arab world. The presence of people from various backgrounds in Kuwait, he said, has created what amounted to a free media zone, probably far ahead of most media in the region. He said that most programming content in the print and broadcast media in the Arab world continue to produce fairly unimaginative representations of daily life. But the emergence of satellite TV changed the rules so significantly, allowing Arab audiences to be privy to different perspectives on their day to day life and their day to day regime.
The increase in competition between country's media has produced a development called "vendetta," which resulted in highlighting the incapacitation of some regimes versus others which became public fare among Arab audiences in a manner they have not witnessed before. One can flick through as many as 10-15 channels and get completely different accounts of the same thing, depending on what station one is watching, giving one the feeling they are in virtual space and don't know where the reality is.
The increase plurality or proliferation of media organizations in the Arab world according to him, made it incredibly chaotic; a frequent criticism of the Arab media as chaotic, unpredictable, erratic and impossible to define and is, in some ways very deregulated, to a great extent deregulated, leading to a debate among people in the region whether the Arab media should be regulated.
Outcome
One positive outcome of plurality however, is that it has re-produced an image of diversity in the eyes of the rest of the world. And the world watching the Arab media finds would find difficulty in considering it a monolith.
As a result, those watching events in the Arab world must articulate from the different perspectives presented by the Arab media; a difference that has created a certain dynamism showing not all newspapers are created alike and they are not seen as just parroting government perspective.
This dynamism of the Arab media is becoming the envy of audiences outside the Arab world. And though there are problems about diversity in and of itself, and it quite possibly is the most exportable characteristic of the Arab world, according to him. Al Jazeera English is by no means the only network communicating in the English language. He said he thinks that in 5 to 6 years, there could be 2-3 similar major satellite projects with operating budgets over $1 billion to communicate with the West. In some ways, he said, such a development will constitute a reversal of the unidirectional flow of information from north to south and from west to east. The desire to communicate with the West using the language they comprehend is something that has transferred itself to a different geographic locale.
Difficult
Right now, he said, Al Jazeera is in a sense doing all the difficult work that the Arab world hasn't done as yet, and that is to explain some aspects of Arab politics not in a monolithic sense, but also in a very critical and diversified sense. Dr Adel Iskandar is a Canadian scholar of Middle East media. His work is highly regarded for its contribution to understanding the news media's impact on Arab audiences both in the Middle East and across the world. Iskandar is the author and co-author of many works including "Al Jazeera: The Story of the Network that is Rattling Governments and Redefining Modern Journalism, the first major analysis of any single Arabic media organization.
Iskandar combines an in-depth knowledge of culture, politics and society in the Middle East with a thorough command of international issues in contemporary media. His current research deals with new media, identity and politics in the region and his forthcoming book is an exploration of internet authority, e-journalism, and blogging across the Arab world and their ambitious implications for global communication. Iskandar has lectured extensively on these topics at universities in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Egypt, Germany, Italy, Kuwait, Morocco, Mexico, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States. He currently teaches at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. Iskandar is also the founder and Executive Director of Voices Without Borders International, a media development NGO focused on capacity-building and training for youth in disadvantaged communities worldwide.
By Boie Conrad Dublin
© Arab Times 2009