continued: "Media Explosion in the Arab World: The Pan-Arab Satellite Broadcasters" by TBS Senior Editor S. Abdallah Schleifer
page 3 of 4
page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4

Like the rest of the Orbit operation, the BBC channel was at the cutting edge of technology and production quality. BBC Arabic TV was not only digital and video compressed, it was also one of the first broadcasting operations to employ non-linear editing, which is clearly the future of television in general and, most obviously and most imminently, of television journalism in particular.

When the BBC Arabic TV Service began June 1994, it went from two hours to eight hours a day. The goal was a 24-hour service with half-hour news bulletins on the hour and the rest of the hour with BBC English-language documentaries and public affairs programing that lent itself to Arabic voice-over. In sheer quantity of news programming, it appeared to overwhelm MBC, even though BBC Arabic News was on the air half the time.

But the BBC Arabic TV service relied on BBC’s English-language TV reporters (whose work is then voiced over) for many of their field reports. Most of its reporting was done by using BBC Arabic radio correspondents who were already in the field. They knew Arabic but did not necessarily know how to do television news. (It’s a lot easier to go the other way—a lot easier for a TV reporter to do radio.) When the service came to an abrupt end in the spring of 1995, it had only three Arabic-language producer/reporters of its own in the field, plus the occasional special Arabic public affairs programming, commissioned directly by Orbit and turned over for transmission to the BBC.

The relative indifference of many BBC executives guiding the channel to Arab cultural concerns, and the often culturally irrelevant if not lifeless quality of the recut documentaries and public affairs programming, were troubling to many Arab viewers. But it was the extraordinary degree of attention given to a Saudi dissident living in London, along with the rebroadcast of an Arabic-voiced-over BBC Panorama show that belittled the Saudi judicial system and its application of capital punishment, which led Orbit’s management to suspend the operation, accusing the BBC of failing to live up to its contractual responsibility of sensitivity to Arab cultural values.

In contrast, MBC has staffed a growing network of news bureaus with its own growing cadre of Arab TV producer/reporters in Cairo, Brussels, Jerusalem, Tunis, Amman, Paris and Washington, D.C. MBC reporting was unique for an Arab broadcaster in its first years, in that in contrast to the news programing of the national Arab channels, MBC followed the international format in which newsworthiness rather than government press releases determined the lineup and in which news stories—be they field reports or studio voice-overs—are scripted to picture rather than an anchor reading wire copy that at best barely approximates the overall content of the available video.

But MBC’s style was also unique because, in contrast to the BBC Arabic service, MBC retained the more cautious approach to confrontational journalism that not only characterizes the Arab media when dealing with its own or friendly governments, but which in principle (rather than opportunistically, as the Middle East case may often be) characterized the quality press in America and England less than fifty years ago, a quality press that took pride that it printed “only the news that’s fit to print.” If MBC's reporting of Saudi Arabian news was noticeably cautious and even sluggish in contrast to the more professional pace of MBC bureau reporting elsewhere, that one singular soft spot would appear to be of far greater importance to foreign critics than to an Arab audience that found MBC’s overall news product exciting, professionally competitive, and credible.

MBC’s problem is that it is again no longer alone. This time it faces news competitors which are less likely to make the same mistakes that Orbit’s BBC Arabic TV service did. One service is al-Jazeera, an all-news Arabic-language channel transmitted via satellite from Qatar that employs many of the former Arabic-speaking broadcasters from the BBC venture. The other competitor is the Arab News Network (ANN), launched in 1997 by Dr. Sawmar al-Assad, a nephew of Syrian President Hafez al-Assad, and within less than a year broadcasting 24 hours a day and using AP-TV to provide local TV field reporting while it slowly builds up its own bureaus. Both services may have their own curious agendas, but the quality of news product and public affairs discussion rivals (but does not surpass) that of MBC. [Editor’s note: these public affairs discussion shows, notably on al-Jazeera, were a hot topic in this issue’s Virtual Symposium.]

As for Orbit, it has gained from the BBC experience another form of feedback, and is now actively committed to increasing the amount of original Arabic programming by dramatically expanding its own production facilities in Cairo, Beirut and the Gulf, while downgrading the size of its operation in Rome. [Editor’s note: see Orbit President and CEO Alexander Zilo's comments on this reorganization in our feature interview.]

As remarked earlier, all of this Arabic satellite programming—some of it not yet up to international standards, some of it a bit irrelevant, and some of it both highly professional and yet Arab in its cultural authenticity—has dramatically stimulated the sale of dishes. But with the increasing availability of dishes has came an increasing concern about program content, particularly from non-Arab sources.

These concerns were broadly cultural, specifically religious, and inescapably political. Islamic society in general, and in this case Arab society in particular, is simultaneously proud of a great cultural legacy preserved through the use of classical Arabic and the media- prevalent modern standard Arabic derived from the classical language, and concerned that this legacy will not withstand the inroads of what is widely seen as a morally flawed popular Western culture that unfortunately seems to accompany the West’s otherwise most attractive technological artifacts.

These tensions have existed for more than a hundred years, but the sudden visual impact of popular Western culture courtesy of television, coupled with radical changes in Western mores—at least as projected in much television programming—over the past three decades has intensified this defensiveness. I am referring to the effect of full or even partial nudity, especially of women; the simulation of sexual intercourse and episodic S and M; the public transmission of obscene speech; the acceptance in television programming of premarital sexual relations as well as the frequent sympathetic treatment of homosexuality as a publicly acceptable lifestyle; and those role reversals in which representatives of law and order are portrayed as villains while outlaws and other criminal types are portrayed as misunderstood romantic heroes. These are shocking to the still strongly held conventions in the Arab world. These conventions are almost universally held to be paramount in public life, even by those individuals or elites who may ignore them, relatively speaking, in their own private lives and in their own private entertainment.

To ignore these conventions, as Iranian television to a certain degree did during the years preceding the fall of the Shah, is to be in political peril. It is instructive that at the time of the Iranian Revolution, one of the first targets for the mobs that surged out of the popular quarters of Tehran was the Iranian TV station.

So the first political concern was the danger of a political reaction, of an anti-Western, Islamic fundamentalist reaction to the sudden easy availability of disorienting, if not destabilizing, cultural materials via DBS/DTH satellite transmission in which pro-Western Arab governments would be held responsible by radical opposition political forces for the culturally subversive content of Western television programming.

Arab national television channels have always, to a greater or lesser extent, rebroadcast Western programming, particularly movies, serials and sitcoms. But this was far different from the specter of indiscriminate Western programming, no longer selectively identified for rebroadcast by the national TV stations and, even when acceptable as a whole, still subject to censorship by the national channels for any socially offensive individual scenes.

The second political concern has to do with government sensitivity to unfavorable news reporting by satellite stations. Sensitivity to reports in the foreign press that are critical of Arab governments is nothing new, but since the foreign press has always had a very limited circulation in the Arab world and can be kept off the newsstands by government censors, the situation has never been as grave as in the case of what is taken to be critical or unfavorable or biased satellite news reports.

Over the past few years, the BBC World Television Service has generally been considered more of a thorn in the side of Arab governments than CNN International, but the fact that both satellite TV news services broadcast in English has reduced the danger as it is officially perceived. That situation changed when Orbit began transmitting an Arabic version of the BBC World Service with full editorial control remaining in the hands of the BBC—in other words, in the hands of non-Arabs. The presence of some of the British as well as Arab old BBC Arab TV hands in the service of Qatar’s all-news and public affairs programming channel al-Jazeera, which seems at times as much devoted to embarrassing Saudi Arabia as it is to free discussion that never manages to touch upon Qatari sensitivities, has further inflamed the situation.

The third political concern has been the possibility of satellite broadcasts from hostile countries. There have been recurrent fears that the radical Islamic fundamentalist movement in Lebanon, Hizbollah, would launch a satellite station devoted to undermining the moderate Arab governments. It is also instructive that Iran, which has recently banned the use of dishes within its own borders, transmits via satellite to the rest of the world.

So most of the Gulf, Jordan and Syria, but in particular Saudi Arabia, have taken to the idea of an alternative delivery system to the direct-to-home (DTH) system. That alternative is MMDS—Multichannel Multipoint Distribution Service, also known as “wireless cable.” It has emerged over the past decade, first in Latin America and most recently in the Arab world, for a variety of reasons as a seemingly attractive alternative to cable, UHF terrestrial pay-TV transmission, and DTH satellite delivery systems. It was initially known as Multichannel Microwave Distribution Service, but that designation has fallen into disuse, largely because of the negative associations in Europe relating microwave transmissions to health concerns. Whether the programming to be transmitted by MMDS is generated locally or pulled down from satellite and retransmitted, the critical factor is the employment of a local broadband delivery system to individual locations from a central transmission point; a high-power microwave transmitter delivers a multichannel signal to individual standard television receivers, either directly or through a series of repeaters or "beam benders” used to overcome obstructions.

The MMDS signal is also encoded or “scrambled” at this central transmission point, since the imperative for the system—whether undertaken by the public sector, as in the case of Jordan and most of the Gulf states, or the private sector as in the case of Saudi Arabia—is subscription television or pay-TV. In an ideal system, signals broadcast at microwave frequencies can be received by small, lightweight and comparatively inexpensive receiver antennas and are then converted to VHF or UHF superband frequencies for interfacing with the standard television set.

Most of the decisions to implement were made in the late eighties and early nineties, when the possibility (which is now theoretically on the horizon) of harnessing existing non-fiber-optic telephone systems for cable transmission was inconceivable and the cost of securing rights of way and digging up streets to lay cable were unacceptable. But like cable, MMDS was attractive in the Arab world because it promised the possibility of developing a pre-emptive alternative to the inevitable appearance of DTH satellite channels originating outside of the region but with footprints extending into the region.

But by the mid-nineties DTH television had become a fact of life, with widespread dish ownership throughout the region and particularly in the Gulf. Dish ownership is certain to increase unless legally forbidden, given the rapid increase in available satellite programming in Arabic as well as Western languages; as footprints become larger and downlinks stronger; and as the cost of dishes drops rapidly, thanks to both cheaper local manufacturing and the stronger satellite signals which make smaller, cheaper dishes more viable than ever before. continued

Next page
page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4