continued: "American-Style Journalism and Arab World Television: An Exploratory Study of News Selection at Six Arab World Satellite Television Channels" by Muhammed I. Ayish

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Broadcast News Between Politics and Journalism
As noted earlier, the breakup of government-controlled and public service television around the world has brought with it new orientations to the relationship between viewers and television as a source of news and entertainment. In the Arab world, the traditional role of television as a mouthpiece of ruling political and economic elite groups came under pressures as new groups began to stake their claims in this important medium of mass communication. Research in the 1970s and early 1980s showed news on Arab television as highly dominated by government sources and activities to the exclusion of other groups (Ayish, 1989). The dominant paradigm of news as a government information outlet dictated the inclusion of protocol news, personality hype, and politically maximizing information in news programs. In technical terms, news formats were characterized by serious and formal delivery methods, usually colored by asymmetrical orientations. Furthermore, newscasters were appearing most often on camera, reminding viewers of radio newscast they had listened to hours earlier. The visual potential of television news was barely evident and so was the handling of domestic issues falling outside government agenda. In its basic configuration, a newscast was a lineup of either very long items dealing with leadership news or very short items dealing with regional and international developments. Television reports were hardly used as the newscast drew on studio delivery (Sakr, 2000).

The launch of commercial television in the Arab world has not only widened viewers' programming choices, but it has also given them access to new formats and styles rarely used in government-monopolized television. Professional rather than political considerations seem to be the driving force behind news work at private stations keen on establishing a foothold in a highly competitive media market. For them, what makes news is a host of values that relate to the event or issue and its significance for the audience. Because most news staff had been either trained in Western countries or had worked in Western media organizations, their sense of news work draws on it as a highly selective process. To this end, private broadcasters have invested heavily in news development by introducing state-of-the-art technologies and establishing far-flung networks of reporters and correspondents who often do their dispatches on live bases. The visual capabilities of television are highly utilized with rich graphics and video materials as well as sleek delivery formats. A newscast is made up of a series of news intros for reports and news items. Rarely does a news item appear with no accompanying video. Conversational and friendly news delivery methods are adopted. As the head of Al-Jazeera Satellite Channel notes:

"It is also a question of the content of the news. You often get here someone reading an item about leaders arriving in the country, sitting together-it's not news, they only do it to give them TV time. The view is of leaders sitting together, talking together, and everything is fine, there's no news. But behind the scenes, everything is not fine. They never put that on the screen. People saw something dramatically different in CNN's coverage of the Gulf War. At that time everyone was watching CNN; no one was watching any entertainment then, just the news. There were so many stories in the war, human interest and war stories even took the place of entertainment" (Schleifer, 2000).

Yet one must note that although objectivity seems to be a distinctive feature of American-style journalism, it does not seem to be as such when it comes to Arab television handling of what are perceived as national Arab concerns like the Palestinian Intifada, the situation in South Lebanon, and the blockade on Iraq. A senior MBC official told this author in 1996 that while this service prides itself on being balanced in its coverage of events and issues, it cannot detach itself from the fact that it is also committed to pan-Arab issues and cannot cover them like any other television network (Ayish, 1998). This statement seems to apply to all other Arab world television channels, which argue that the centrality of the Palestinian cause dictates that they take their Arab viewers' side by promoting Palestinian perspectives.

Method
The current exploratory study is based on a five-day sample of nightly newscasts carried by five Arab world satellite television channels representing varied professional and political orientations:

MBC: Owned and operated by the Saudi ARA Group International (AGI), this commercial Arabic single-channel service was launched on September 18, 1991, from studio facilities in London. MBC provides a middle-of-the-road mixture of news, information, and entertainment, modeled on Western broadcasting production values and practices. One study found that MBC was particularly attractive to viewers because of its news and current affairs programming (Ayish, 1997).

Al-Jazeera: This Qatar-based service was launched in November 1996 with a six-hour transmission that ran around the clock by February 1999. Al-Jazeera has risen to prominence in the past three years in light of its daring handling of social and political issues in the Arab world, where audiences had been used to monolithic media performance. In as much as Al-Jazeera has won the hearts and minds of millions of viewers, it has also incurred the anger of numerous Arab governments for its critical coverage of social and political issues. The service draws on a highly professional staff with international experience as well as on state-of-the-art digital production technologies. Al-Jazeera has been hailed as the only satellite television service in the Arab world to deal with issues of corruption and polygamy (Hafez 1999, 75).

LBC: LBC was originally launched on August 23, 1985 as a private terrestrial broadcasting organization, the first in the Arab world. It went on the air as one of 50 stations in Lebanon at the time. Even so, the service claims to command 60 percent of market share in a highly competitive environment. By January 2000, the Lebanese service was transmitting special television packages to Europe, the United States, Africa, and Asia.

Abu Dhabi Satellite Channel (ADSC), a government-operated service based in the United Arab Emirates with state-of-the-art technologies, professional staff, and mostly entertainment-oriented programming. ADSC operates as part of the Emirates Media Corporation, a newly established media body serving as an umbrella for one national newspaper, three television stations, four radio stations, and numerous publications. During the past two years, ADSC has experienced major development and technical modernization.

Syrian Satellite Channel (SSC): This is a government-controlled and operated television service with traditional news and public affairs programming format, yet with modern entertainment offerings. Since President Bashar Al Asad of Syria assumed office in July 2000, the opening up of a traditionally closed media system has been one of his priorities. This attitude has been slowly reflected on the programming content of Syria's local and satellite television services. News, however, remains confined to conventional formats.

The five-day sample was taken over the following dates: Friday Sept. 22, Saturday Sept. 30, Sunday Oct. 8, Monday Oct. 16, and Tuesday Oct. 24, all in the year 2000. Newscasts were recorded off the air and coded for the following themes: news topic, news format, area of coverage, and attitudes. continued

Next page: Findings

References
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