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By
Marwan M. Kraidy
Abstract
The most popular and controversial television programs in the
Arab world are “reality” shows like Super Star
and Star Academy, broadcast by satellite to viewers
from Morocco to Iraq. These shows claim to be live, non-scripted
and therefore "real". Many rely on audience participation
in the form of voting for favorite contestants. In the wake
of controversy triggered by Super Star and Star
Academy, some observers have hailed reality television
as a harbinger of democracy in the Arab world. This article
explores the complex ways in which Arab reality television can
be described as political and poses questions about the role
of reality programs in the Pan-Arab public sphere. Based on
fieldwork, textual analysis, and interviews with television
producers and market researchers, this article concludes with
preliminary observations on the political implications of Arab
reality television.
Introduction
Reality television (1) entered Arab public
discourse in the last five years at a time of significant turmoil
in the region: escalating violence in Iraq, contested elections
in Egypt, the struggle for women’s political rights in
Kuwait, political assassinations in Lebanon, and the protracted
Arab-Israeli conflict. This geo-political crisis environment
that currently frames Arab politics and Arab-Western relations
is the backdrop to the controversy surrounding the social and
political impact of Arab reality television, which assumes religious,
cultural or moral manifestations. This article explores the
connections between Arab reality television and the political,
economic and socio-cultural forces that animate contemporary
Arab public discourse. It offers observations on how public
contention about reality television articulates these forces
to issues such as inter-Arab relations, democratization and
political participation. The article concludes with questions,
to be addressed in future research, about the ways in which
public contention around reality television overlaps and spills
into Arab political life.
Specifically,
this article offers preliminary analysis of public discourse
surrounding three reality television programs, Super Star,
Al Ra’is, and Star Academy, used as
comparative case-studies to map the dynamics of contention in
the Pan-Arab public sphere. The analysis is based on seven months
of fieldwork in Beirut and Dubai in 2004 and 2005, including
more than 100 interviews with people involved in production,
promotion, evaluation, and research on the audience of Arab
reality television programs, in addition to textual analysis
of around 50 hours of the programs themselves.(2) This initial
research indicates that reactions to Arab reality television
fall in two broad camps. On one hand, there is a large group
of young people and adults who follow reality television programs,
some of them more or less regular viewers, others avid fans,
making some reality television shows the most popular programs
in Arab television history. On the other hand, there is a relatively
small but vocal minority of religious leaders and political
activists who have condemned reality television because in their
judgment it violates Islamic principles of social interaction
and/or facilitates cultural globalization characterized by Western
values of individualism, consumerism, and sexual promiscuity.
This article
recognizes that opinions on reality television in the Arab region
are more diverse than the two broad categories mentioned above,
including those who dismiss reality television on the grounds
that it is contrived dramatically, mediocre artistically, or
simply not very interesting. To that end, it seeks to distinguish
competing political, religious and economic discourses that
are compelled into public debate on the impact of reality television
on Arab societies. This article is drawn from a working book
manuscript,(3) and therefore it is best construed as offering
a set of preliminary observations rather that definite interpretation.
These observations will focus on the overlaps between popular
culture and politics in the context of the public controversy
surrounding reality television, within the framework of the
relationship between the broad categories of “politics”
and “entertainment.”
Politics
and Entertainment
Long treated as two distinct and separate spheres, the realms
of politics and entertainment have become increasingly related
in mass mediated societies where they both rely on celebrity
and public recognition. The overlap is probably most pronounced
in the United States since 1992, when presidential candidate
William Jefferson Clinton played his saxophone on MTV. This
issue took surreal dimensions nearly a decade later when World
Wrestling Federation ex-star Jesse “The Body” Ventura
won the governorship of Minnesota as a third party candidate
against two powerful mainstream opponents. In the late 1990s,
US television, from celebrity gossip shows to serious network
news, was abuzz with rumors of Hollywood stars and business
tycoons running for political office: Warren Beatty, Clint Eastwood
and Donald Trump were imputed political ambitions, rumors that
most of them did nothing to undermine. Even after the September
11, 2001 attacks on the United States, when pundits proclaimed
the end of both innocence and insouciance, and the return to
more serious matters of state, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Austrian-born
Mister Universe turned Hollywood action hero, was elected governor
of the American state of California. Michael Moore’s Academy
Awards diatribe against George W. Bush in 2004 was watched by
millions throughout the world, triggering widespread commentary
in the international and Arab press. The United States continues
to be, in the words of Neil Gabler, the “republic of mass
entertainment.”(4)
Elsewhere
in the world, the connection is less patent, but signs of it
exist everywhere. The transformation of Cicciolina from porn-star
to member of the Italian parliament, Bob Geldof’s crusade
for debt relief in the developing world, and Indian movie stars
dabbling in politics, are all indications of blurring boundaries
between entertainment and politics, with most “cross-overs”
being from the former to the latter. In Egypt, Lebanon and Saudi
Arabia, newspaper cartoons and comedic television programs have
long been a platform for caustic political satire, with the
special Ramadan broadcast of Tash ma Tash, a Saudi
television comedy, stirring controversy in Saudi Arabia at the
time of this writing.(5) The connection between politics and
entertainment in the developing world sometimes takes indirect
forms. In India, the television broadcasts of the historical
Hindu epics, Ramayana and Mahabharata, were
concomitant with a changing political landscape, and by some
accounts, to the redefinition of politics in India.(6) In Latin
America, telenovelas often take on politicized socio-economic
themes.
In most
of the non-Western world, cultural production is an arena where
various forces struggle to define national identity in ways
that are more contentious than in the West. For example, the
commoditization of the female body in popular culture, which
in the West is often marginally discussed as a moral issue,
creates major controversies in the non-Western world, where
women’s roles are central to historical memory and national
identity. In short, the impact of entertainment television on
public discourse in developing countries(7) is explained by
“popular culture’s ability to produce and articulate
feelings [that] can become the basis of an identity, and that
identity can be the source of political thought and action.”(8)
That popular
culture creates identities with political potential, or perhaps
more accurately, that it integrates already existing group identities
and serves as a platform for their exaltation in public discourse,
is made clear by the controversy surrounding Arab reality television.
Reality television broadcasts are public events in Arab countries,
compelling various actors to articulate competing social identities
and political agendas in a process of public contention whose
objective is to favor one or another vision of the good society.(9)
Because of its high visibility, popular culture in general and
reality television specifically, is a magnet for contentious
politics because the upheaval over its implications for Arab
societies stands for a larger, ongoing debate about Arab-Western
relations and socio-cultural change. The overlap between popular
culture and politics exposes fault-lines in Arab societies as
the popularity and controversial status of reality television
brings to the surface latent socio-political tensions.
To illustrate
these processes of contention, this article takes three reality
television shows as case-studies. The first is Super Star,
the Arab version of Pop Idol or American Idol,
the second is Star Academy, the Arab version of Fame
Academy, and the third is Al Ra’is, the Arabic version
of Big Brother(10) . The first was produced by Future
Television, a Lebanese channel owned by the family of the late
Rafiq al-Hariri; the second was launched by the Lebanese Broadcasting
Corporation (LBC); the third was broadcast by the Dubai-based,
Saudi-owned Middle East Broadcasting Center (MBC). Superstar
and Star Academy were shot in Lebanon, Al Ra’is
in Bahrain. The first two have been extremely popular among
Arab audiences and have garnered record advertising rates, with
Star Academy being unequivocally the most popular and
probably the most controversial satellite television program
in Arab history. The third program, Al Ra’is
was shut down one week after it went on the air in 2004, due
to intense controversy including street demonstrations in Manama,
Bahrain’s capital. Public discourse around these programs
illustrates how various groups use them to articulate and legitimate
competing ideological agendas. In particular, after exploring
the emergence of nationalist speech in tandem with reality television
broadcasts, my observations focus on how business and religious
leaders, among others, use the visibility of reality television
to increase the public’s exposure to their views.
Reality
Television and Inter-Arab Rivalries
Developments in the Arab media industry during the last 15 years
are dominated by a trend towards regionalization.(11) Nationally
oriented terrestrial television channels and national daily
newspapers remain popular and influential in some Arab countries,
but regional satellite television channels such as Al Jazeera,
Al Arabiya, LBC and MBC, and regional newspapers such as Al
Hayat, Asharq Al Awsat and Al Quds Al Arabi,
all three London-based, have a strong following and usually
set the terms and rhythm of Pan-Arab public discourse. Like
other regional media industries in Latin America and South East
Asia, Arab satellite television tends to produce programs that
appeal at once to city dwellers in Baghdad and Casablanca and
to rural viewers in the Egyptian sa’id and the
Lebanese jurd, although it is mostly focused on urban
middle-class viewers that appeal to advertisers. Additional
trends underscoring Arab satellite television’s trans-regional
mode of address include (1) the development of what is now known
as “white Arabic,” a media compatible, simplified
version of Standard Modern Arabic that is becoming a lingua
franca for regional public discourse, (2) the advent of
stars with regional appeal (whether they are journalists, program
hosts, singers, or to a lesser extent, actors) and (3) the standardization
of production practices in Beirut, Cairo and Dubai.(12)
At another
level, the rising popularity of television formats that Arab
channels purchase from the Netherlands and the United Kingdom
and then adapt to Arab audiences has brought to Arab screens
a flurry of what can be called “hybrid” programs
because they combine a “global” format developed
in Western Europe or the United States, with “local”
content that appeals to the cultural sensibilities of specific
audiences. In 2004 and 2005, many media executives in Beirut
and Dubai said to me that “the gossip in the [satellite
television] industry used to be about who is creating what,
and now the gossip is about who is purchasing which format.”
In my interviews with satellite television professionals, there
were no indications of dissatisfaction with this situation,
since in most cases importing program ideas and adapting them
is less arduous than creating original programs(13) Clearly,
television format adaptation suits satellite television channels
because it allows them to bypass several steps in the production
process and to fashion programs for a Pan-Arab audience living
between Rabat and Baghdad. The resulting productions mix elements
from “East” and “West” and draw on the
cultural repertoires of various Arab countries. The cultural
hybridity of these programs, and many of them belong to the
reality genre, contributes to unpredictable audience reactions
and, as we shall see shortly, heated public debates.(14)
Regionalization
is well established in the Arab satellite television industry
as a business and marketing strategy. Many promotion and marketing
managers I spoke with in Beirut and Dubai wax lyrical when conjuring
up visions of a Pan-Arab audience whose millions of viewers
transcend inter-Arab divisions. Politically and culturally,
however, regionalization is skin deep, as demonstrated by expressions
of rivalry between Arabs from different countries during the
2003 broadcast of Future Television’s Super Star.
Launched with great success in 2003, this Arabic version of
Pop Idol raised Future Television’s stature both
nationally and regionally as thousands of Arabs auditioned to
participate in the program and millions watched and voted for
their favorite contestants. Super Star rested on the
basic premise of singers performing on stage in front of three
jurors. Elias al-Rahbani, member of Lebanon’s most famous
musical family, donned edgy eyewear and black turtlenecks to
play the role of juror-in-chief, a convincing if a bit contrived
copycat of Simon Cowell, the acerbic music producer and jury
leader in the American version of the show, American Idol.(15)
As it reached
its final weeks, Super Star’s competition turned
from an artistic competition between individual contestants
to an international rivalry in which each contender was primarily
performing as a representative of their country.(16) From the
early weeks of the program, viewers could see the flag waving
by the in-studio audience, and text messages feeding into television
tickers depicted patriotic statements often accompanied by icons
of national flags whose on-screen appearance was made possible
by Multimedia Messaging Service. Even before the last couple
of weeks when the competition intensified significantly, there
were reports that voting was occurring on national bases, which
meant that the wealthy inhabitants of the countries of the Gulf
Cooperation Council (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia,
and United Arab Emirates) would give Super Star contestants
from those countries an edge in the competition. However, with
the presence of the jury, artistic talent was a determining
factor,(17) and the three semi-finalists were a Jordanian woman,
a Lebanese man and a Syrian man. This combination of nationalities
created controversy. When the Lebanese competitor was eliminated
in the semi-final, riots broke out in Beirut and fans stormed
the stage in protest, as Lebanese converged to the studios in
large demonstrations. Fuelling this discontent was a rampant
rumor that Syrian political pressure led to the elimination
of the Lebanese candidate. Syria, euphemistically dubbed by
Western news agencies as Lebanon’s “power broker,”
in fact micro-managed all Lebanese affairs until Syrian troops
withdrew from Lebanon in April 2005 under the combined pressure
of massive street demonstrations in Beirut and United Nations
resolution 1559 co-sponsored by France and the United States.
Until the withdrawal, the head of Syrian military intelligence
in Lebanon was the de facto ruler of the country, and
the Lebanese believed that very little happened in Lebanon without
Syrian approval or intervention. It was therefore not surprising
that Lebanese viewers were suspicious about the transparency
of the process that led to the elimination of their national
contestant.
In addition
to these complicating issues between Lebanon and Syria, modern
Jordanian-Syrian relations have been riddled with tension for
various political reasons, including Syrian resentment about
the Hashemite monarchy’s historically compromising stance
towards Israel. The voting frenzy surrounding Super Star
became a competition between these countries. When Super
Star fever reached Syria itself, telecommunications companies
installed billboards on Damascus thoroughfares promoting the
Syrian contestant and exhorting Syrians to perform their national
duty and vote for him. In interviews with Western press agencies,
Syrians on the street were unequivocal: They were voting for
him because he was Syrian. The fact that he was a good performer
was just fine, but his national identity was the primary motivation
for their participation in the show.(18) Special mobile telephone
lines were devoted to the endeavor. In Jordan, rumors spread
of a full-fledged national mobilization. King Abdallah himself
was reported to have instructed officers in the Jordanian armed
forces to issue orders to the soldiers under their command to
vote for Diana Carazon, the Jordanian candidate who ultimately
was crowned “Superstar of the Arabs.” Businesses
exploited the situation as a marketing opportunity, with an
ice cream parlor offering free ice cream for those who vote
for Diana Carazon, and a car dealership took an ad in the daily
Al-Dustour advertising a 2003 sedan that it would give
to Diana Carazon.(19) Jordan’s telecommunications companies,
who were poised to make large profits from their share of the
voting bills,(20) entered the fray, with Fastlink and Mobile
Com pledging “full support” and launching a daily
print advertising campaign urging readers to support the Jordanian
contestant and vote for her(21) .
Super
Star stimulated patriotic feelings among its viewers that
were exploited by political leaders and the corporate world.
As an Associated Press wire report described it, “Arab
‘Idol’ [was] a Battle of Nations.”(22) This
battle was all the more visible because of the enormous Pan-Arab
audience that Future Television’s flagship program attracted:
More than 30 million viewers watched the finale of Super
Star 1,(23) and 4.8 million voted, 52 percent for Diana
Carazon.(24) The division of passions and votes according to
national affiliations undermines claims that Pan-Arab satellite
television is uniting Arabs “from the (Atlantic) Ocean
the (Persian) Gulf” in one community of feeling. While
there are burning issues with transnational appeal, such as
the plight of Palestinians and Iraqis under occupation, they
appear to cede the way, even if temporarily, to more provincial
affirmations of patriotism in the course of voting in popular
reality television programs such as Super Star.
Unlike Star
Academy and Al Ra’is, Super Star
did not trigger a major “moral panic.” Rather, it
elicited commentary that is clearly political. The Islamic Action
Front, a Jordanian political formation with ties to the Muslim
Brotherhood, issued a “Press Statement Surrounding the
Program Super Star,” condemning it for “promoting
cultural globalization” and the Americanization of Islamic
values, but the debate in Jordan fizzled away as a Jordanian
won the competition. In the second installment [Superstar
2, 2004], a Palestinian contestant from the West Bank town
of Salfit, Ammar Hassan, rose to favorite contestant status,
partly to the Arab public’s sympathy for the Palestinians.
On the nights when he performed, the 12,000 residents of Salfit
stayed indoors, glued to their screens, and when he rose to
the finals against the Libyan Eyman Al-Atar, 2,000 people gathered
in a Salfit park to watch together, chanting “Ammar, Ammar,
Super Star!” In spite of this popularity, Hamas
condemned Palestinian reactions to Super Star in the
following statement:
“Our people are in need of heroes,
resistance fighters, and contributors to building the country
and are not in need of singers, corruption mongers, and advocates
of immorality”(25)
That reactions to Super Star are explicitly articulated
in political and ideological terms should not obscure the tendency
of such public controversies to blur the boundaries between
the political, socio-cultural and moral realms. Super Star’s
format itself was acceptable to all but the most radical
Islamist interpretations of social behavior, since candidates
sang on a stage facing a jury from a relatively significant
distance and there was little interaction or physical contact
between men and women. This was not the case with other Arab
reality television programs, such as Al Ra’is
or Star Academy, where stage proxemics emerged as a
key reason for outrage in some quarters of the Arab public.
The controversies associated with Big Brother and Star
Academy reveal that these debates are better understood
as involving a complex tug-of-war between different contenders
rather than a simple binary opposition between morally controversial
forms of popular culture and morally strict speakers in the
name of Islam.
Reality
Television, Business and Religion
It is a well-rehearsed cliché that Islam pervades Arab
socio-cultural and political fabrics. The validity of this proposition
suffers from periodic episodes of over-stretch when some observers
of the Arab world rely on Islam as an all-encompassing determinant
of social relations to the detriment of other factors, the relevance
of which may be obscured by religious determinism. The following
episode points to the continued emergence of neo-liberal speech
in the Arab public sphere, and that even when arguments that
claim a basis in Islam win, they increasingly are contested.
When the Middle East Broadcasting Center (MBC) interrupted the
shooting and broadcasting of Al Ra’is only a
week after it began in Bahrain in February 2004, virtually all
reports on the incident in the press credited¬ –-or
blamed—Islamic activists.(26) While a demonstration by
Islamists against the show did occur, the Al Ra’is
episode was not a simple chain of cause-and-effect that press
renditions suggested. Rather, as we shall discuss shortly, it
was a complex issue that triggered debate in the Bahraini parliament
and involved arguments counter to those of the Islamists.(27)
The upheaval surrounding Al Ra’is illustrates
that business interests have become powerful enough to contest
ostensibly religious arguments in public debate in countries
of the Arabian Gulf. According to press reports, the death of
Al Ra’is was primarily caused by a kiss—literally,
a kiss of death—between Abdel Hakim, a young Saudi man,
and Kawthar, a young Tunisian woman. By this account, the live
broadcast of a kiss triggered active and vocal objections to
the program, including a demonstration in Bahrain’s capital
Manama that, according to witnesses I interviewed, included
a couple of hundred men. According to Islamist leaders, their
main criticism was grounded in religious morality. A conservative
member of the Bahraini Parliament, Sheikh Adel al-Mawda, said
of Al Ra’is, “This program showed an abnormal
way of living, which is totally opposed to our thoughts, culture,
everything … It is not reality TV at all, especially in
our part of the world.”(28) This and other similar statements
suggest that the claims made on reality television programs
that they represent “reality” are contentious in
themselves.(29) The dispute around whether reality television
does or does not represent reality, which I am exploring in
a different essay, suggests that notions of representation,
specifically representations of “Arab society” or
“Islamic society,” are being contested publicly.
So far,
the story seems to follow a familiar script: Islamic cleric
opposes popular culture that reflects Western values; in turn,
religious “traditional” society bows to religious
edicts. However, the complexity of the Al Ra’is
episode comes to view when we consider that members of the Bahraini
parliament rose in defense of the program, and especially when
we examine the arguments they used. Defenders of Al Ra’is
publicly argued that the program would boost tourism to Bahrain
and therefore contribute to economic growth.(30) In a small
country with dwindling energy reserves whose rulers are betting
its future prosperity on its status as a financial hub and the
world’s leading center for Islamic finance, arguments
couched in the language of economic pragmatism appeal to a section
of the elite whose members feel enough self-confidence to articulate
publicly a discourse that contests and offers an alternative
to the Islamists. According to the daily The Bahrain Times,
a special parliamentary committee discussed the impact of Al
Ra’is on Bahraini society and considered “ways
to protect investments and preserve Bahrain’s Islamic
ethics.”(31) The article then quoted the head of the committee,
Member of Parliament Ahmed Ibrahim Bahzad, whose words reflect
that the debate went beyond an opposition of Islamists to the
culture industry:
There are three distinct opinions about
Big Brother, and they reflect the vivacity of our society
… There are people who reject the program completely;
the second section does not show any interest in the issue,
while the third group says that the focus should not be on the
program but on the participants … There are people who
want to cancel the contract with the producing companies, but
this is opposed by the businessmen who fear that such a decision
would hurt Bahrain’s reputation and undermine potential
investment agreements.(32)
In the Arab
context, references to “national reputation” arise
in the context of government suppression of political dissent
or, less frequently, sexual content. It is frequently used against
journalists critical of government policies. Invoking the trope
of national reputation in reference to Bahrain’s fitness
for investment suggests a shift in Arab public discourse towards
neo-liberal governance. This is echoed in appeals to government
efficiency and responsiveness to the practical needs of citizens.
In their opposition to the shutdown of Al Ra’is,
“liberal” Bahraini politicians countered the Islamists
with socio-economic arguments. Thus another member of Bahrain’s
parliament, Abdullah al Dossary, argued that “[T]here
are other important issues to be tackled by the deputies. Why
all the fuss over a TV show? What happened to the citizens’
problems such as housing, salary improvement and education?”(33)
This attention to the every-day life concerns of the citizenry,
with bigger economic arguments in the background, indicate that
a purely “culturalist,” in this case Islamist, explanation
of public debates about the impact of reality television provides
us with a partial understanding of an overall picture in which
non-religious forces contend with speakers in the name of Islam.(34)
The official
explanation that came out of the Middle East Broadcasting Center
itself suggests that religion was not the dominant factor in
their decision, or at least that MBC management claims other
reasons. Even after deciding to cancel Al Ra’is,
MBC argued that the program “was more realistic in reflecting
the reality” of Arab youth than other reality television
programs, adding a business explanation to the controversy:
All
new products need time to be accepted. In certain cases, they
can be wrongly interpreted … By this sacrifice, MBC does
not want to risk, through its programs and broadcasting, being
accused of harming Arab traditions and values, because it considers
the channel one for the Arab family.(35)
This corporate
statement reflects the importance of business considerations
in MBC’s decision to shut down the program. Its “family
channel” brand risks losing its luster if it keeps a program
on the air that a probably small but nonetheless vocal minority
considered contrary to “family values.” The mention
of “sacrifice” finds its explanation in the official
MBC statement declaring a loss of $6 million because of the
shutdown of Al Ra’is, an enormous amount by regional
standards, although the real figure is hard to know. The invocation
of “Arab traditions and values” is itself significant
in that Islam as such is not mentioned in the statement, in
spite of the fact that opposition to the program was mainly
under the banner of its putative violation of Islamic values.
One aspect
of the Al Ra’is episode is grounded in one Islamic
interpretation of gender relations, which considers haram,
or prohibited, the unsupervised social mixing of men and women
unmarried to each other, or ikhtilat. Objections to
the program, even though they were not always explicitly articulated
as such, focused on the fact that unmarried men and women lived
together in one house, creating potential for flirting, physical
contact, and even sexual intercourse that are considered illicit
in some of the stricter interpretations of Islamic texts. Bahrain
being part of the more socially and religiously conservative
Gulf countries, although less conservative than Saudi Arabia
and Kuwait, it is not surprising that controversy erupted there
over Al Ra’is. As we will see shortly, producers
could get away shooting a similar show in Lebanon, where Star
Academy was soon to become a regionally unprecedented popular
and commercial success story. As an American reporter quipped:
Neither
of the first two shows [Al-Hawa Sawa(36) and Star
Academy] generated quite the horror of ‘Big Brother,’
in part because they were broadcast from Lebanon, which much
of the Arab world considers depraved anyway. Lebanon’s
satellite networks already have a reputation for showing female
employees on air with minimal wardrobes.(37)
The remaining section of this article discusses how criticism
of interactions between men and women was at the center of the
controversy surrounding Star Academy.
Reality
Television and Gender Relations
If Super Star showed popular culture as a site of resurgent
nationalisms and inter-Arab rivalries, and if Al Ra’is
exposes the vulnerability of the Arab satellite television industry,
Star Academy demonstrates that a television program
can become a highly controversial public event that not only
survives its numerous critics but at the same time saturates
Pan-Arab public discourse, becoming a full-fledged media event.
The Lebanese
Broadcasting Corporation’s Star Academy is the
Arabic version of an original format owned by the Dutch format-house
Endemol, which became familiar to some Lebanese viewers through
the 2002 French version by the French broadcaster TF1.(38) Contestants
in the first installment of Star Academy (2003-2004),
or, as they were officially called, “the students,”
hailed from Egypt, Kuwait, Lebanon, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and
other Arab countries.(39) The students took lessons in oral
interpretation, dancing, singing, music, fashion, hair-styling,
and make-up. Every week, the teachers designated two “nominees,”
(the English word was used), and after a live Friday night show
performed by the students, the audience was asked to vote for
the nominee who they wanted to remain on the show. The other
nominee was in effect voted out of The Academy, the four-story
building near LBC headquarters in Adma, Lebanon. LBC management
devoted regionally unprecedented resources for the program,
starting with a vast Pan-Arab recruitment campaign that whittled
3,000 applicants to 16 finalists and a prominent programming
schedule, including nightly one hour “access” shows,
a weekly two-hour Friday “prime,” and a 24-hour
satellite channel airing feeds from the 60 cameras in The Academy’s
building.(40) Several LBC executives, including the network’s
general manager Pierre al-Daher, indicated that Star Academy
was considered their flagship program and given marketing, promotion,
production and programming resources commensurate with this
status.(41)
Star
Academy was an instant hit. Arabs young and old, men and
women, rich and poor, were enthralled for 18 weeks between December
2003 and April 2004.(42) During daily access shows, the streets
of Beirut, Riyadh and Rabat emptied out and restaurant owners
complained that Star Academy was killing their business
during the lucrative dinner hours. The fever reached its highest
pitch on Friday night during the “prime” when “the
students” performed, including the two nominees, one of
whom would be voted out at the end of the broadcast. Arab youth
created fan sites on the Internet, including discussion boards
where writers declared their undying love to Bruno, the Lebanese
contestant, and Sophia, the Moroccan participant, who for a
while emerged as the favorite heartthrob and sex-symbol, respectively.
Rumors spread of a love affair between Sophia and Bashar from
Kuwait. The highly popular satellite television music channels
such as Rotana, Saudi-owned and Lebanon-based, and Melody Hits,
which is Egyptian-owned and based, displayed a flow of love-and-hate
messages sent via mobile phone text messages that appeared on
moving tickers at the bottom of the television screen.(43) Women’s
daytime talk-shows and men’s public affairs programs discussed
the phenomenon. According to market research companies, Star
Academy grabbed 80 percent of the 15 to 25 audience in
Lebanon, and after a few weeks captured record audiences in
Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries.(44)
Star
Academy was as controversial as it was popular. Clerics
and politicians from Morocco to Iraq condemned it; electronic
diatribes swirled against it in cyberspace. In the wake of the
transformation of Bashar al-Shatti, a Kuwaiti contestant and
penultimate finalist, into a Pan-Arab heartthrob, and after
a concert in Kuwait by Star Academy finalists, the
Dean of the School of Islamic Law and Shari’a
at Kuwait University issued a religious opinion (fatwa)
condemning it. The Kuwaiti parliament discussed legislation
to “protect morality” from Star Academy,
and Islamist members of Parliament grilled the Minister of Information
and pressured him to resign for allowing the broadcasts.(45)
A Saudi columnist in the establishment daily Al Riyadh
called Star Academy “a whorehouse,” using
epithets rarely printed in the Saudi press, while an audio cassette
tape, titled “The Academy of the Devil” and carrying
fiery sermons, was distributed by religious activists in Saudi
Arabia.(46) Religious leaders were inundated with requests for
rulings on whether it was haram or halal to
watch and participate in the show. A Sunni cleric from Lebanon
claimed that the devil was present in the program. In what amounted
to a rare dissenting youth voice in a cyberspace, where young
people were overwhelmingly enamored with the show, an Islamist
youth group set up a website called No2StarAcademy.net.(47)
As mentioned earlier, a political party in Jordan close to the
Muslim Brotherhood issued an official statement against reality
TV, accusing it of promoting American interests and facilitating
cultural globalization. Perhaps more importantly, the venerable
and official “Permanent Committee for Scientific Research
and the Issuing of Fatwas” in Saudi Arabia issued a lengthy
fatwa, replete with citations from the Koran and Hadith,
prohibiting watching, discussing, voting in or participating
in Star Academy.(48)
The controversy
surrounding Star Academy persisted and evolved into
a highly public debate about a variety of hot-button issues
having to do with modernity and tradition, social change and
cultural identity. The program was not banned; rather it continued,
perhaps predictably, to grow in popularity. Talk-shows invited
clerics, psychologists and media professionals to debate the
show’s popularity and impact. The pages of the Pan-Arab
press echoed with praise or condemnation, or with comparisons
between voting procedures in Star Academy and governance
and elections in Arab countries. The Internet buzzed with discussion
boards. During the second two months of the first Star Academy
[March and April 2004] Star Academy was invoked on
television talk-shows and in newspaper columns as a code word
for contentious issues such as Arab-Western relations, the status
of women and youth, and elections. In effect, Star Academy
was appropriated as what I call an idiom of contention,
with important implications for the overlap between popular
culture and politics discussed below.
Reality
Television and Public Contention
The political
implications of transnational Arab reality television rest to
a large extent in the way that it draws out into the public
sphere competing arguments about politics, economics, culture,
religion and the myriad interconnections between the four. In
that respect, reality television activates processes of public
contention at the regional, Pan-Arab level that nonetheless
take distinct shapes in the various national spheres in which
they unfold. As we already have seen, Superstar activated
patriotic feelings that were manifest in nationalistic rivalries.(49)
The debate over Al Ra’is in Bahrain took the
shape of a struggle between Islamic interpretations of the good
society and business considerations of national reputation.(50)
The controversy over Star Academy, while taking a Pan-Arab
character, was also articulated to issues that were specific
to individual countries. Thus the impassioned debate about Star
Academy 1 in Kuwait cannot be disassociated from the struggle
for women’s political rights that was at a high pitch
when a Kuwaiti contestant in Star Academy was rising
to the finale. Opponents to Star Academy and to Kuwait
women’s political rights were the same: The Islamists
led by MP Walid al-Tabtaba’i. In both cases, Islamists
“lost,” with Kuwaiti women winning political rights
in 2005 and Star Academy broadcasts continuing into
Kuwait.(51) In Lebanon, even on the screen of LBC itself, discussions
about the role of the media (educational or commercial?), the
role of media policy (dirigiste or laisser-faire?),
and the role of parents (to prohibit their children from watching
Star Academy or to watch it with them?), were all conducted
in the context of the Star Academy controversy.(52)
Public contention
involves making public claims over courses of collective action,
articulated as putative social values, in order to change or
maintain the status quo. Public contention is therefore a politically
invested rhetorical space. Because of its resounding success
with Arab audiences, reality television is a magnet for contentious
politics, drawing contenders with conflicting ideologies and
asymmetrical symbolic resources, who use the introduction of
reality television and the debate surrounding it in order to
advance their agendas by attempting to redraw the boundaries
of Arab public discourse. The re-definition of “national
reputation,” from a notion connoting “political
unity and the absence of dissent” to one meaning “readiness
for foreign investment,” suggests that boundaries are
being redrawn. But whether reality television, ostensibly a
harbinger of “modern” political values and behaviors
such as voting and public debate, affects social change that
ultimately contributes to the democratization of Arab politics
is an issue that can only be determined with the benefit of
historical hindsight and sustained empirical research. At the
moment, however, some political implications of Arab reality
television can be discerned in the programs discussed in this
article.
Star
Academy is, in many ways, a political program. It is political
first in the sense advanced by the “alternative future”
explanation of the show’s popularity, in that it stages
an apparently fair competition whose participants count on their
personal initiative, creativity and skills, and whose winners
are determined by a popular vote. This “reality”
is discordant with that of most young Arabs, who are prevented
from expressing their opinions, who get their jobs because of
connections and rarely because of competence, and where power
is wielded arbitrarily by unelected rulers and officials. In
that sense, according to this perspective, reality television
is the harbinger of an alternative future.(53) The theme song
of the program, Jayee al Haqiqa (Truth is on the Way),
an Arabic version of Let the Sunshine In, from the
soundtrack of the movie Hair, is directly political,
both in its lyrics, which decry a situation of falsity that
the forthcoming truth will expose, and visuals expressed in
the music video.(54)
The music
video, directed by leading Lebanese director Nadine Labaki and
produced by Lebanese production house Talkies under the EMI
label, appears to confirm the song’s political tenor.
Shot with a blue filter, the video features the Star Academy
contestants marching through streets, waving the flags of their
respective countries: The Lebanese flag with the cedar between
two red bands, the Tunisian with its white crescent and star
on red background, the Saudi with its white sword and Islamic
script on green background. The video clearly connotes a youth
political protest march, brandishing their fists, waving flags,
expressing discontent with their situation and invoking an alternative
reality dominated by truth, warmth and light.(55) Had Star
Academy not achieved enormous popularity, its content would
not have articulated Arab social, political and economic reality.
Its huge following, however, made it profoundly political.
Major events
can inject an extra dose of politics into reality television
programs. When a car bomb killed Lebanon’s ex-Prime Minister
Rafiq al-Hariri in Beirut on February 14, 2005, both Super
Star and Star Academy became overtly political.
The former stopped regular broadcasts and auditions for the
next year’s installment, and participants in several installments
of the show released what became known as “patriotic songs,”
broadcast around the clock by Future Television. The Hariri-owned
channel was transformed into a full-time media machine to glorify
the martyr, help his son Saad Eddin’s coalition to win
a majority of Lebanese parliamentary seats in the 2005 legislative
elections, and maintain public pressure to get to “the
Truth” about the assassination of its founding owner.
Star
Academy 2’s producers also strategically drew on
al-Hariri’s assassination. Roula Saad, director of Promotion
and Marketing at LBC, who doubles as the director of “The
Academy,” curtly announced on the air: “Mr. Hariri
is dead. Lebanon is mourning.” The brevity ostensibly
was intended to allow the “students” to “stay
focused” on the competition.(56) After a hiatus of 10
days of mourning, however, LBC resumed Star Academy with a “prime”
on Friday, January 25, 2005, which turned into a nationalistic
fest with patriotic songs performed participants in Star
Academy 1 and 2, and ended with the voting out of the Syrian
contestant Joey.(57) Several newspapers commented on the political
connotations of that prime in a context where Syria was held
responsible for Hariri’s death, a suspicion which subsequently
was formalized in the report issued in October 2005 by a United
Nations investigative team headed by German judge Detlev Mehlis.
Conclusions
The various
television programs discussed in this article and public discourse
around them suggests that Star Academy and its competitors
are having an impact on Arab public discourse and politics.
But whether these overlaps between popular culture and politics
justify the argument that reality television is “the best
hope for democracy in the Arab world” remains to be established.(58)
The empirical investigation of the links between reality television
and democracy requires a strict operational definition of “democracy”
that falls outside of the scope of this article. It is an issue
in need of further research with the combined benefits of empirical
depth and historical distance. In the meantime, we can conclude
this article with a few observations that can be used as guidelines
or at least as discussion points as research on this topic advances.
First, a
conceptual distinction must be made between “democracy
of participation” and “democracy of governance.”
The former is a prerequisite to the latter, but not a substitute.
Reality television activates the former, but it is so far doubtful
that it will lead to the latter. Even in the case of the demonstrations
that followed the assassination of Rafiq al-Hariri and forced
the resignation of then Lebanese Prime Minister Omar Karami,
some social uses of technology compelled by reality television
(using mobile phones for mobilizing and voting, etc.) played
a role, but how decisive of a role is something that remains
to be explored. That viewers learn to use their mobile phones
to vote and even forge alliances is potentially significant,
but many other conditions, including functioning institutions,
accountability mechanisms, etc.—some that have nothing
to do with television—have to be realized before this
leads to sustainable change that expands the avenues of inclusion
and participation in political processes. That viewers use their
mobile phones to vote for their favorite Super Star contestant
does not necessarily turn them into activists for democratic
participation and governance.
Second,
to the extent that voting via mobile phones is a major source
of profit for both mobile phone providers and television channels,
reality television poses a flagrant conflict between economic
and political interests. Even though telecommunications and
television executives are prohibited by non-disclosure agreements
from revealing the number of calls made during reality television
voting, it is well known in both industries that a relatively
small number of voters are behind a relatively large volume
of votes.(59) Those with high incomes can vote a theoretically
infinite number of times, which means that the one-person, one-vote
principle at the heart of democratic practice is trampled over,
and that wealthy people have more voting power than others.
This could skew results of all Arab reality shows in favor of
the wealthy Gulf countries, especially given that, as explained
earlier, a nationalistic streak is evident in voting patters.
Third, Arab
media are controlled by the same business-political elite whose
interest in profit is inversely proportional to their interest
in political change, which would strip from them some of the
privileges they otherwise would not have if Arab countries were
to develop more transparent governance procedures. It is unlikely
that the son-in-law of the Saudi king would allow the television
network he owns to proceed with shows that contribute, even
rhetorically and no matter how indirectly, to undermine the
power structure in Saudi Arabia, just as it is improbable that
the owners of a Lebanese television channel would allow expression
of political dissent that may end up stripping some of the privileges
that the business elite received from its patronage of the political
class.(60)
Fourth,
out of the three programs discussed in this article, the two
that survived controversy were produced in and broadcast from
Lebanon, probably the most “liberal” and “Western-oriented”
of all Arab countries. Concepts and language from reality television
were present in the demonstrations following the assassination
of al-Hariri, which did lead to the resignation of a sitting
Prime Minister (Omar Karami), a rare occurrence in Arab politics.
However, had Hariri been a “regular” Arab politician,
without a global business empire and personal friendships with
heads of state, and/or had the United States and France not
decided to collaborate on passing UN 1559 in the Security Council,
would the demonstrations have occurred or lasted as they long
as they did last? Also, the extent to which these events will
have an enduring impact on Lebanese politics, and whether similar
events could occur in other Arab countries, are issues that
have yet to be explored.
The political
slogans of activists in the Arab world reflect a media-savvy
generation mindful of the advantages of encapsulating a political
agenda in one word: Kifaya, or “enough,”
for political activist attempting to end Mubarak’s long
reign in Egypt; Al-‘An, or “now,”
for Kuwaiti women unwilling to wait longer to obtain their political
rights; Al Haqiqa, or “the Truth,” for
Lebanese demonstrators pressing for the truth about the perpetrators
of the bombing that ended Hariri’s life. The laconic style
of these political campaigns does reflect, to some extent, the
concise vocabulary of reality television (“nominee,”
“prime,” etc). It also is compatible with news media
routines based on the visual snapshot and the sound bite. In
an age of the 24-hour news cycle, when Arabs are being subjected
to a combination of American plans to re-shape the Middle East,
activists understand and exploit the fact that a television
camera can protect them, at least temporarily, from harassment
by the mukhabarat (intelligence services) and assorted
state apparatuses. However, more research is needed to understand
the scope, depth and impact of these new information dynamics.
Fifth, analysts
of the putative political implications of Arab reality television
may have a lesson to learn from the experience of media scholars,
who went through a period characterized by excessive optimism
in the ability of viewers to “empower” themselves
by “subverting” media messages. Such scholars now
eschew the excesses of “active audience” theory.(61)
Television viewers, Web surfers and mobile phone users, prodded
by reality television, participate in television shows and express
their opinions on the tickers of television screens and on fan
sites and discussion groups. They are indeed active and creative
in how they conduct these activities, but whether this leads
to a significant and sustainable opening at the political level,
and whether participation in reality shows leads to long-term
civic or political participation that in turn leads to systemic
and sustainable changes in Arab governance, remains to
be seen.
Marwan
M. Kraidy is Assistant Professor of international
relations and international communication at American University
and a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for
Scholars, both in Washington, DC; and a TBS Contributing Editor.
He is the author of Hybridity, or, The Cultural
Logic of Globalization (Temple University Press, 2005),
and co-editor of Global Media Studies: Ethnographic Perspectives
(Routledge, 2003). He is working on his current book project,
Screens of Contention: Arab Media and the Challenges of Modernity
at the Wilson Center. Sections of this article were presented
at the University of Texas Austin in February 2005 the University
of Westminster in June 2005, and Kuwait University in November
2005. The author is grateful to the United States Institute
of Peace for funding part of the fieldwork on which this study
is based; and to Marlena Badway, Joe F. Khalil, Naomi Sakr and
the two anonymous peer-reviewers for their helpful recommendations.
NOTES
1.
The boundaries of the reality television genre are notoriously
porous. In this article the moniker “reality television”
refers to programs that have defined themselves as “reality
television,” which applies more to Star Academy
and Al Ra’is than to Super Star. However,
the latter was included in discussions of reality television
in Arab public discourse, and therefore in this study.
2. Because of space considerations, it is impossible to include
verbatim material from the interviews and detailed textual analyses
in this chapter, which will have to await the book-length treatment.
3. Marwan M. Kraidy, Screens of Contention: Arab Media and
the Challenges of Modernity, book manuscript in progress.
4. Neil Gabler, Life the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered
Everyday Life (New York, 1998).
5. Tash ma Tash is produced privately for Saudi TV,
but was broadcast by MBC during the 2005 Ramadan season. Other
controversial Ramadan programs include Al Hawr Al-Ayn,
a Syrian dramatic series broaching the phenomenon of terrorism
in Arab societies, also broadcast by MBC, which generated heated
debate from the mainstream Saudi press to radical Islamist internet
fora.
6. Arvind Rajagopal, Politics after Television: Hindu Nationalism
and the Reshaping of the Public in India (Cambridge, 2001)
7. For discussions of this issue in various regions of the world
see Nestor García-Canclini, Consumers and Citizens:
Globalization and Multicultural Conflicts (Minneapolis,
2001) and Jesus Martín-Barbero, From the Media to
Mediations: Communication, Culture and Hegemony (London,
1993) for Latin American; for India, Walter Armbrust, Mass
Culture and Modernism in Egypt (Cambridge, 1996) and Lila-Abu
Lughod, Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television
in Egypt (Chicago, 2005), for Egypt; Marwan M. Kraidy,
Hybridity, or the Cultural Logic of Globalization (Philadelphia,
2005), pp 116-147, for Lebanon, and Patrick D. Murphy and Marwan
M. Kraidy, Global Media Studies: Ethnographic Perspectives
(London, 2003) for various other regions and countries, including
Lebanon and Mexico.
8. John Street, Politics and Popular Culture, (Philadelphia,
1997), p. 10. Also, the globalization of American political
campaigning and electioneering practices, with their heavy reliance
on television, should also be mentioned as a factor tightening
the connections between politics and popular culture worldwide.
9. “Visions of the good society” include an Islamist
order based on the life of the salaf, or ancestors
from the early days of Islam, and the freedom to make money
for media corporations.
10. The Arabic name adds another layer to the Orwellian connotation
of the name Big Brother, since Al-Ra’is means
“president” or “leader” in Arabic, and
has the same root with the word ra’s, Arabic
for “head.”
11. For more on the regionalization of Arab media, see Jon Alterman
(1998) New Media, New Politics? (Washington, DC), Marwan
M. Kraidy (2002). Arab Satellite Television Between Globalization
and Regionalization, Global Media Journal, 1, 1, Naomi
Sakr, Satellite Realms: Transnational Television, Globalization
and the Middle East (London, 2002), and Marwan M. Kraidy
and Joe F. Khalil (2006, forthcoming), “Current Trends
in the Arab Television Industry,” in Media Globe:
Trends in International Media, Y. Kamalipour and L. Artz
(Eds.), Lanham, MD, Rowman and Littlefield.
12. Made possible by satellite technology, this regionalization
is driven by economic calculations. In news, regionalization
has created an “anywhere but here” trend whereby
satellite television channels tend to criticize all governments,
politicians, etc, except those from the country in which they
are based. It is well known, for example, that Al Jazeera’s
editorial line, which is critical of Arab governments, rarely
raises questions about Qatari affairs, especially government
performance. However, Al Jazeera’s relentless criticism
of Saudi Arabia’s rulers creates a kind of “asymmetrical
interdependence” between Qatar and Saudi Arabia by giving
more influence to the former. In that context, the creation
of Al Arabiya by the Saudis aims at restoring the asymmetry
to its fullness between Qatar and Saudi Arabia by undermining
Al Jazeera’s influence. For a detailed discussion of these
issues, see Marwan M. Kraidy and Joe F. Khalil (2006, forthcoming),
“Current Trends in the Arab Television Industry,”
in Media Globe: Trends in International Media, Y. Kamalipour
and L. Artz (Eds.), Lanham, MD, Rowman and Littlefield.
13. The logistical complexities inherent in reality television
programs has led to the rise of the position of “executive
producer” in Arab television to supervise all the “story
producers” and other “producers” whose task
focuses on a single aspect of a reality show. For this insight
I am indebted to Joe Khalil, who was recently creative director
for a reality television program at MBC in Dubai.
14. For a detailed discussion of hybrid media programs, see
Marwan M. Kraidy, Hybridity, or, the Cultural Logic of Globalization
(Philadelphia, 2005), pp 97-115.
15. The discussion will refer mostly to the first installment
of Super Star in 2003, later dubbed Superstar 1
in light of newer seasons of the program. When subsequent installment
are discussed, they are referred to as Super Star 2
or Super Star 3. Simon Cowell is the acerbic leader
of the panel of judges in American Idol, the US version
of the same program.
16. Among other reports on this issue, see Bassem Mroue, “Arab
world’s version of American Idol has nationalistic
bent”
17. I discovered that there is a consensus among media professionals
and journalistic critics of television that Super Star
featured “real voices,” while Star Academy
featured contestants with flamboyant or camera-friendly personalities,
but with lower-caliber voices. Press commentary expresses the
same consensus.
18. “Arab Idol a Battle of Nations,” Beirut, Associated
Press, 18 August 2003. For a more detailed treatment of how
Super Star was received in Syria, see Tyler MacKenzie,
The Best Hope for Democracy in the Arab World: a Crooning TV
"Idol"? Transnational Broadcasting Studies
(13), 2004.
19. “Arab Idol a Battle of Nations,” Beirut, Associated
Press, 18 August 2003.
20. In order to vote, viewers call “toll” numbers,
with a charge several times higher than the price of a normal
phone call. Profits are divided according to pre-set agreements
between television channels and telecommunications companies.
21. “Pan-Arab song contest fuels passions in Jordan,”
17 August 2003, Jordan Times.
22. Idol a Battle of Nations, Beirut, Associated Press, 18 August
2003.
23. Maalouf, Lynn (2004, January 14). “Western television
craze makes assured debut on region’s networks,”
Daily Star.
24. Abou Nasr, Maya (2004, 4 February). “Who wants to
be a Superstar? 12,000 do,” Daily Star. According
to the same source, the fever carried through into the next
season: Responding to casting calls on the screens of Future
Television, 60,000 people applied and 40,000 auditioned for
Super Star 2.
25. Habeas, Abed, “Palestinian singing finalist tunes
into nationalism,” Associated Press/ Boston Globe, 23
August 2004
26. These include Western press reports and newspaper articles
throughout the Arab world.
27. MBC staff ––from management to the producers
and directors involved in Al Ra’is––
were reluctant to discuss the issue during personal interviews
I conducted in Dubai in 2004 and 2005. However, information
gleaned in fieldwork leads me to believe that there were factors
internal to MBC that contributed to the controversy, to be discussed
in the book-length treatment. Other factors to be explored in
the larger study could include ever-present tensions between
the majority Shiis and ruling Sunnis in Bahrain.
28. MacFarqhar, Neil, “A kiss is not just a kiss to an
angry Arab TV audience,” The New York Times,
5 March 2004.
29. Reality television’s claim to be “real”
is an issue that has received significant scholarly attention,
for example in Mark Andrejevic, Reality TV: The Work of
Being Watched (Lanham, MD, 2004) and Annette Hill, Reality
TV: Audiences and Popular Factual Television (London, 2005).
In my ongoing book project mentioned in the first note, I argue
that this issue is even more important in the Arab context where
defining social reality is a highly contentious matter as it
is at the heart of issues of cultural and religious authenticity
and Arab and Islamic relations with the Western world.
30. MacFarqhar, Neil, “A kiss is not just a kiss to an
angry Arab TV audience,” The New York Times,
5 March 2004.
31. “The reality of Reality TV in the Middle East,”
www.albawaba.com/ news/printArticle.php3?sid= 271966&lang=e,
7 March 2004.
32. “The reality of Reality TV in the Middle East,”
www.albawaba.com/ news/printArticle.php3?sid= 271966&lang=e,
7 March 2004.
33. “The reality of Reality TV in the Middle East,”
www.albawaba.com/ news/printArticle.php3?sid= 271966&lang=e,
7 March 2004.
34. The socio-economic arguments could be described as “emergent”
while Islamist claims can be said to be “established,”
a distinction admittedly in need of elaboration. While in this
case the show was canceled, the fact that Gulf Arab politicians
opposed public claims that shroud themselves in religion is
significant, as is MBC’s rhetorical gesture to use “Arab”
as “opposed” to “Islamic” in its corporate
statement, even when there is connotative overlap between the
two adjectives.
35. “The reality of Reality TV in the Middle East,”
www.albawaba.com/ news/printArticle.php3?sid= 271966&lang=e,
7 March 2004.
36. Al Hawa Sawa was a match-making program produced
by Arab Radio and Television (ART) in which 8 single women competed
for a marriage proposal. The program was shot in Lebanon.
37. MacFarqhar, Neil, “A kiss is not just a kiss to an
angry Arab TV audience,” The New York Times,
5 March 2004. Al-Hawa Sawa, an Arab reality television
pioneer, featured a group pf unmarried women competing for a
husband.
38. Because a large section of the Lebanese population is Francophone
and some of it Francophile, the low-cost pirate cable operations
offer a variety of French channel as part of their line-up.
39. While the discussion moves between Star Academy 1
(2003-2004) and Star Academy 2 (2004-2005), the first
installment was a greater Pan-Arab media event, but the latter
was more explicitly politicized in the wake of Hariri’s
assassination.
40. Personal interview with Roula Saad, Director of Promotion,
Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation, Adma, Lebanon, 5 July 2005.
41. In addition to LBC boss Pierre al-Daher, whom I interviewed
on July 5, 2005 and August 21, 2005, and Director of Promotion
Roula Saad (5 July 2005), these include Sebouh Alavanthian (5
July 2005), director of the programming department, and Ronny
Jazzar, president of Star Wave, an LBC affiliated production
and promotion house (mid-July 2005).
42. Personal interviews I conducted with audience researchers
at IPSOS-STAT OMD and PARC in Dubai and Beirut, June 2004 and
June 2005, confirm what Sebouh Alavanthian, Director of the
Programming Department at LBC, claimed: that Star Academy was
successful with all demographic segments, although it particularly
drew young viewers.
43. The overwhelming majority of text messages come from countries
in the Gulf Cooperation Council, mostly from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait
and the United Arab Emirates, which suggests a positive link
between income levels and volume of text-messages.
44. Personal interviews conducted by the author with audience
researchers at IPSOS-STAT OMD and PARC in Dubai and Beirut,
June 2004 and June 2005.
45. The Kuwaiti information minister did lose his job in March
2005, in a cabinet reshuffle triggered by (among other factors)
the powerful Islamic bloc in parliament wanted him out, and
the new Minister stated he will reactivate a “unit”
at the Ministry to “monitor” music videos and reality
TV shows for offensive content. It is useful that Kuwait was
then witnessing the peak of the struggle for women’s political
rights, which mobilized the Islamist political constituency.
46. Al-Dakhil, Mounira Mohammad, “Destructive Academy
is Harmful to the Family,” al-Riyadh, 27 February
2005.
47. This site was very active during the first season of Star
Academy but has since then been taken off the World Wide
Web.
48. While the Permanent Committee has issued opinion about mass
media issues in the past, this is to my knowledge the first
time that an entire fatwa is devoted to a single television
program.
49. Technical developments such as Multimedia Messaging System
(MMS) have encouraged national identification by inserting on
the television ticker, a coloured flag of the country from which
the call was made.
50. Interviews with five media professionals involved in the
program indicate that there are other factors having to do with
the interlocking media and political elites in Saudi Arabia,
but these sources requested anonymity and asked that this issue
not be discussed in detail at this time.
51. In a compromise with the Islamists, Star Academy 2
finalists did not give a concert in Kuwait. The concert given
by Star Academy 1 finalists in Kuwait was the lightening
rod of the Islamists. Some might also say that the law giving
Kuwait women their political rights compromised with the Islamists
when it stipulated that women’s political participation
was to be framed by vaguely mentioned “Islamic principles.”
52. See for instance, the 7 March 2004, episode of the news
show Al-Hadath, in which a Saudi journalist, a Lebanese
advertising executive, a Lebanese psychoanalyst and LBC’s
Director of Promotion and Marketing, debated the program, interspersed
with reports about the reception of Star Academy in
various Arab countries.
53. There were many articles in the Western and Arab press presenting
this argument, the latest being Carla Power, “Look Who’s
Talking,” Newsweek International, 8 August 2005,
pp 50-51. While this argument is worth considering, we should
certainly be cautious not to exaggerate the democratizing impact
of reality television, or at least give some time for systematic
research on the topic before we make optimistic claims.
54. Again, caution is advisable in evaluating the political
impact of this video clip, in distinction from its political
connotations.
55. In hindsight, the visuals of the video clip bear an uncanny
resemblance to the Beirut demonstrations in the spring of 2005,
with the exception that in the video clip many Arab flags were
waived while in Beirut all flags were Lebanese.
56. Various news stories in the Lebanese and Pan-Arab press
in the second half of February 2005, including Annahar,
Assafir and Al-Hayat.
57. At that time tensions between Syria and Lebanon reached
their peak since the early 1990s, as there was a widespread
suspicion that Syria contributed one way or another to al-Hariri’s
death. What occurred on the Star Academy 2 stage reflected
popular discontent with Syria in Lebanon. Contrary to the clapping
and dancing that usually accompanies the exit of a losing contestant,
the amphitheater where the primes are shot was fully silent
as the Syrian contestant stepped out.
58. I am referring here to Tyler MacKenzie, The Best Hope for
Democracy in the Arab World: a Crooning TV "Idol"?
Transnational Broadcasting Studies (13), 2004.
59. The amount of profit derived from voting is the best-guarded
secret in the industry, and even journalists who cover the media
offer informed speculation. Everyone I interviewed however agrees
that significant profits are made from voting, and that in some
cases they exceed advertising revenues.
60. " In Saudi Arabia and Lebanon, as in most other Arab
countries, the media elite interlocks with the political elite,
either through business or family relations."
61. A detailed discussion of the many ebbs and flows of this
debate can be found in Patrick D. Murphy and Marwan M. Kraidy,
Editors (2003). Global Media Studies: Ethnographic Perspectives.
London: Routledge.
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