New Technologies: A Bullhorn for Once-Quiet Voices

New international communication technologies are indeed helping to break the hold of the First World (the United States and Europe) on the flow of information. To see just what an effect they have had, we need look no further than the cases of satellite television and Internet use in the Arab world.

For this argument to be convincing, we should first paint a picture of what public discourse and communications in the Arab world looked like before these emerging technologies gained a foothold in the region. Media outlets were largely state-owned and poorly circulated. Newspapers could be counted on to repeat the party line in most states (Beckerman). This meant that the most meaningful news was being generated entirely by American and European news outlets.

This all added up to a chilling effect on public discourse: Arabs did not have access to high quality news, and when they did, it was written by others, not them. In a short interview I conducted for a separate project on bloggers in Syria, Joshua Landis, Co-Director of Peace Studies at the University of Oklahoma and a prominent blogger on Syria,, described the pre-satellite TV situation in Syria like this:

"In the 1980s, Syria was a dark and gloomy place in terms of public discourse. It was hard to find a happy conversation about politics," he said. Syrians' only source of news and information were the state run newspapers. "The major revolution was satellite TV. Internet was the next wave…. People are getting a much more sophisticated view of the world. Now, you can have exciting conversations in Damascus about politics, and the Internet is a big part of that."

The damage to public discourse was not the only blow that the lack of indigenous news sources dealt to Arab societies. It was also a major blow to Arab peoples' public diplomacy. Largely unable to speak for themselves in the global arena, they had their portraits painted, lives described and motives explained by people who had no day-to-day stake in their societies. I would like to posit that this engendered a certain amount of resentment towards the Western media and a long-standing feeling of mistrust – even suspicion – towards it. The relationship between the United States, Europe and the Arab world is still suffering from this climate of mistrust and antagonism today.

We should be clear at this point that it was not only Western media companies who contributed to the dismal state of Arab journalism in the pre-satellite, pre-electronic era. It was also a product of the policies of Arab governments. Of course, some of these governments, it could be argued, were in place only because the United States was propping them up. Nevertheless, we should not look at the situation as a one-way suppression of Arab voices. Local governments and circumstance also played a role.

The Satellite Revolution

This all changed in the 1990s, with the dawn of the satellite revolution in the Middle East. Suddenly, people had access to news sources from around the world in their own homes, and state-owned media outlets lost relevancy.

The satellite revolution took off, I argue, because of three factors: (1) the widening availability of satellite dishes in different Arab countries, (2) the launch of the Egyptian satellite Nilesat (which brought the Arab directly into the space age) and (3) the rise of Arab-owned news and entertainment channels. Chief among those channels, of course, is Al Jazeera. But there are others, also: There is Future TV, based in Lebanon and once part-owned by the country's former prime minister, the late Rafiq al-Hariri; Al-Manar, the Hezbollah-financed news station in Lebanon; MBC, Saudi-owned and based in London; LBC, the Lebanese Broadcast Company, based in Lebanon and, at least its inception, with ties to the Syrian regime (Sakr).
Below, I briefly outline the rise of two prominent news channels: Al Jazeera, which is the best known, and Al Manar, lesser known in the West and far more controversial.

Al Jazeera

Tracing the rise of Al Jazeera is particularly instructive in showing how the new technologies have introduced new voices from the developing world in global media. Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, Emir of Qatar, created Al Jazeera with seed money of $137 million in February 1996 “as part of an effort to modernize and democratize” the country (Zednik). Since then, accordint to Rick Zednik in the Columbia Journalism Review:

“[Al Jazeera] has grown rapidly, expanding from its original six hours a day to twelve and then, on January 1, 1999, to twenty-four hours. It employs 500 people, including seventy journalists. Among its twenty-seven bureaus are offices in Washington, New York, London, Paris, Brussels, Moscow, Djakarta, and Islamabad.”

The attacks of September 11, 2001 and the Afghanistan war introduced the US to Al Jazeera, because the channel was the only one that carried the kind of exclusive and in-depth coverage that American outlets needed for their own reporting (Zednik). This was partly because the Taliban in Afghanistan allowed only Al Jazeera to stay in Kabul and report during the Aghan war (Zednik). Later, Al Jazeera’s profile rose even more when – somewhat infamously – it aired a tape of Osama bin Laden denouncing the U.S. (Zednik). Since then, Al Jazeera has become an indispensable addition to the world news scene and, as Zednik writes, “[i]t was not simply covering the war; it became an important player in the global battle for public opinion.”

Al-Manar

Founded in 1991, Al-Manar represents a totally different side of the satellite revolution, because it is subsidized by the Hezbollah militia in Lebanon. For this, the US declared the news outlet a terrorist entity in 2004 (Drees). Bombed in 2006 in Lebanon, Al Manar has a broad audience in the Middle East and an estimated 10 million viewers daily worldwide (Goldberg). The outlet also has an English service, which is available anywhere in the world, expanding its message far beyond the borders of Lebanon.

The Backlash

In history, for every successful effort to change a status quo, there is almost always a backlash. This has happened with Arab media, and it is actually an indication of that media’s growing prominence.

Even though Al Jazeera and other stations that rose with it during the same period were started by financiers with close ties to the governments of the countries in which they were based, they were still private enterprises that fell outside the direct purview of state entities (Sakr). This had an unsettling effect for Arab governments who had long exercised full control over the media in their country: Alan George, author of the definitive book Syria: Neither Bread nor Freedom, writes that satellite and Internet have been a "nightmare" for Syria's regime (George 135).
But it would be incomplete not to note how strongly the West has also reacted to the emergence of these Arab news outlets, and this is the truly telling point. According to the Columbia Journalism Review, in the opening days of the Afghanistan war, US forces bombed the Kabul bureau of Al Jazeera; they also later bombed the Baghdad bureau during the Iraq war (Pintak 2006). In 2006, Israel bombed Al-Manar, an action that the International Federation of Journalists condemned. Israel also bombed another convoy of Arab reporters. (Pintak 2006).
These incidents highlight, in a twisted way, the growing importance of the Arab media outlets. As they have raised their voices for the first time, the West does not always like what it sees, has struck back, and has often characterized the Arab news outlets as not being legitimate sources of information – the designation of al-Manar as a terrorist entity in 2004 because it is associated with a political party and militia group in Lebanon to which the US is opposed is just one example (Drees). The fallout from that move has even reached the United States – in 2006, a man in the New York area was charged for planning to make the channel available to New York-area viewers. (BBC 2006).

The Internet Revolution

The Internet has provided an even more direct channel than satellite TV for Arabs to express themselves. This new wave of technology has had a much more subdued effect in the Arab world – Internet use is still in its infancy in the Arab world compared to the United States and Europe. But there are qualitative differences to the Internet that may make it even more important in the future. The main factor that differentiates Internet-generated journalism from satellite television is its extremely low cost. One small example is instructive: the Jordanian news site Ammon.net, run in part by Basil al-Okoor, who had also worked for a state information agency until recently losing his job (Al-Asmar). The popular site actually has no office and a very low budget – it is generated out of in Internet café in Amman. Nevertheless, "it has become routine for many Jordanians to access the Ammon website to find information that is not carried by the regular newspapers, whether it is of articles or cartoons," writes Hilmi Al-Asmar on the Internet news site Menassat. In this case, new technology has allowed a small number of Jordanian journalists to instantaneously reach a global audience, and provide their own version of the news.

Conclusion: Success and Caveats

The examples above plainly show that new technologies have helped developing countries wrest control of at least some of the overarching media narratives from rich countries’ companies. This may not have created angles on the news that we in rich countries particularly like, but the effect is undeniable.

Still, we should be careful of over-optimism about the power of the technologies themselves to effect this emancipation. The Arab world presents a unique context in which such a technological emergence is possible: there is capital available in some countries, especially the Gulf, and the populations are relatively more educated than they are in the poorest corners of the earth. Valuable media that is indigenous to the developing world needs the right conditions – conditions like these – not just new technology. Recent reports of rising violence against journalists – regardless of their medium – and declining quality in reporting point to some of the obstacles to letting new technologies fulfill their potentials (BBC Monitoring World Media 2006).

Overall, however, it is clear that satellite TV and the Internet have had a dramatic effect on the news landscape, and that we now hear from more developing world voices than ever before.

Bibliography

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