continued: "Transnational Media and Social Change in the Arab World" by Jon B. Alterman
to page 1 | Notes

Public Opinion and Arab Identity

The increased debate about public policy issues has resulted in many governments' increased need to be attentive to public opinion. Decreasingly satisfied with accepting government "lines," Arabs have increasingly engaged in domestic discussions throughout the region that have served to shape government opinion instead of merely being shaped by it. For example, in private discussions with U.S. government officials in late 1997 and early 1998, regional leaders frequently cited public opinion concerns to explain their reluctance publicly to support the use of force against Iraq, regardless of their distaste for Saddam Husayn. Public opinion is also cited by some Arab leaders as a powerful force in their calling for the normalization of relations between all Arab countries, which would involve rehabilitating Iraq, Libya, and even Sudan from their current positions as rogue states subject to international sanctions. Widescale efforts to aid the "suffering of the Iraqi people" have been increasingly visible in the Arab world, although in all cases the suffering has been described as a consequence of international sanctions, not the brutal dictatorship of Saddam Husayn.(10) The issue is not so much that these "rogue" regimes are honorable but that they are Arab. Many Arabs perceive that these countries have been singled out for opprobrium because of their Arabness, and for that reason all Arabs should rally around their cause. Another issue that has become ascendant in recent years is the idea of preserving an Arab Jerusalem. Arab television stations have telethons for their causes, and foundations establish sites on the World Wide Web.

Interestingly, Islam has also emerged in some elements of the media as a unifying force for the region. It is impossible to say whether this is driven primarily by the fact that the overwhelming majority of Arabs are Muslims, or by the dominance of Saudi financing in the transnational Arab media. Nevertheless, it is important to note that, whereas states and elites led the charge for pan-Arabism in the 1950s and 1960s, transnational Islamic movements and their mass followings are much more important actors today, and their efforts are being significantly abetted by the new media.

A final impetus for the "new Arabism" is that as Arabs interact with non-Arabs, they become increasingly aware of their "Arabness." Although none of this obviates their loyalties and identifications with their individual states, Arabs' increasing interaction with non-Arab cultures, and their treatment by those cultures as Arabs rather than as holders of specific nationalities, moves Egyptians, Syrians, Palestinians, and Saudi Arabians to have a heightened Arab identity vis-à-vis the outside world.

Reintegration of Arab Diasporas

One of the most fascinating results of the new transnational media is the extent to which they have allowed the reintegration of Arab emigrants into Arab life and society. No longer cut off from their homelands, many Arabs living in the West read Arab newspapers (either in print or on the internet), watch Arab television (MBC, ART, and LBC are available in the United States by satellite and in some areas by cable), and actively seek out Arab sites on the internet. Even Iraq's United Nations ambassador, Nizar Hamdoon, breaks out of his isolation in New York by heavily using the internet. He told the Washington Post, "I do the internet, I keep up with the latest news, I browse through the CNN page and the web sites of newspapers I cannot get here. There are lots of Iraqi community chat rooms. I don't give my name. Regardless of their political, social or economic background, they [the people in the online chat rooms] all feel that what is happening to the Iraqi people is unfair."(11)

The image is a startling one, but the fact is that there is an online community of Arabs based simultaneously in London, New York, and many cities of the region. As the amount of information about the Arab world available outside the Arab world blossoms, location becomes less and less relevant for one to play an active role in modern Arab society.

Something as mundane as decreasing prices for international telephone calls play a role as well. For many years, countries have raised the price of or taxed international phone service to subsidize domestic operations. Under World Trade Organization rules, however, international phone tariffs are expected to drop precipitously in the coming years. As they plummet, so too will the costs of faxes and other transmissions of information over phone lines (including the use of international phone lines for internet access). Because of relative ease of use and a large installed base, in the intermediate term the telephone may prove more important than the internet as a conduit for new ideas to enter the Arab world and for reports of conditions within the Arab world to reach Arab communities outside.

The enlargement of the Arab community to bring Arabs back into contact with their own societies (and doing so increasingly through interactive media, given the growing prevalence of the internet in the United States) has had the remarkable effect of reinserting expatriate Arab intellectuals into the Arab world. A host of Western-based Arab academics—many of whom left the Middle East to undertake doctoral research and then found employment in the West studying the Arab world—are becoming fixtures in the new Arab media.(12) Western-based Arab newspaper correspondents and columnists also "write back" into the Arab world, and they are clearly affected by their surroundings. The internationalization of media coverage has, to a great degree, become like a huge exchange program, in some ways making the West more aware of Arab concerns, but in many ways making the Arab world more aware of the political and social mores of the West. There is a remarkable cross-fertilization of ideas taking place between Arab intellectuals in the West and their colleagues remaining in the Arab world, enabled and driven by the new media.

Even within overseas Arab communities, the internet is causing fascinating changes. As anthropologist Jon Anderson points out, online "communities"—chat rooms, bulletin boards, usenet groups, and so forth—are not typical of the societies from which their members have emerged. The online Arab community is disproportionately composed of scientists, engineers, and students; theologians, politicians, and military officials are underrepresented. The result, Anderson reports, is that individuals who at home would yield to the opinions of specialists find themselves venturing into religious and political topics. In so doing they bring the insights and tools of their professional training to the discussion, resulting in a new "creole" discourse that combines elements of discourse from their own places of origin with Western scientific training and scholarly inquiry.(13) Arabs still in the Arab world can monitor and participate in most if not all of these discussions, although in doing so they are potentially subject to the same sorts of monitoring that characterize all of their internet use.

In all of this cross-fertilization, there are two groups involved. The first are bilingual Arabs, resident either in the West or in the Arab world. They have a choice of language in which to communicate, and often they will communicate some kinds of messages in Arabic and others in Western languages, especially English. The second groups, however, consists of a larger group of Arabs who are not bilingual. For this group, the media are considerably more important and more broadening. The transnational Arab media become not only their link to other Arabs, but also a fundamental link to the rest of the world. Although some dismiss the new ideas as "corrupting," for large portions of the Arab public this link to the rest of the world is both fascinating and desirable.

There remain large segments of the population, however, for which the changes outlined above are irrelevant to their lives. The regional Arab media remain something of a rich man's game, and penetrations beyond the elite level is slight except in wealthy Gulf states. The effects of the "cross-fertilization" of ideas and reintegration of diasporas will be uneven in the short and intermediate term, although the strong desire for transnational media among the elites in country after country suggest that the media will have a strong effect, even if that effect is from the top down.

The Growing Importance of Market Forces

To date, market forces have played a relatively minor role in Arab countries. State sectors have generally been strong (either as a legacy of Arab socialism or as a consequence of state control over petroleum revenues), and private sectors have been somewhat weak. States have either owned media outlets outright or orchestrated the existence or demise of these outlets. Advertising revenues—the mother's milk of media production the world over—has been paltry. As former al-Hayat editor Jihad al-Khazen bemoaned, total advertising spending in the Arab world in 1994 was $900 million, while Israel itself had an advertising expenditure of $800 million.(14)

Yet, the trend has begun to shift. The regional Arabic-language print and satellite-broadcast media described above have seen a marked increase in advertising spending in recent years. In 1997 alone, for example, advertising spending on pan-Arab (i.e., satellite) television grew by 96 percent over the previous year, to $202 million.(15) Between 1995 and 1997, advertising spending in pan-Arab magazines increased by 36 percent, and in newspapers by 14 percent.(16) The total Arab advertising market has enlarged as well, growing from $1.13 billion in 1995 to $1.54 billion in 1997.

The products advertised are familiar to most Americans. The top ten brands advertised in the regional Arab media and in the member states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) are Toyota, Nissan, Marlboro, BMW, Pampers, Pantene, Hyundai, Ford, and Chevrolet.(17) Pampers is the most-advertised brand on television in this market, followed by Pantene. Toyota leads in newspaper spending, and Marlboro in magazines. By type of product, the most advertised products on pan-Arab television were adult personal hygiene and health products, followed by shampoos and other hair products, and candy and snacks.(18) The foregoing suggests that what is emerging is not merely a Western-style advertising market, but Western-style brand-name development, Western-style consumption patterns, and personal lifestyles that are more Western, at least in their outward manifestations.

This trend toward Westernization is neither a completed process nor a foregone conclusion; in addition, it is hard to foresee how more Western consumption patterns (disposable or consumable branded goods) might affect other aspects of Arab life. It has become a trope of Western media reports about Saudi Arabia and Iran to note that veiled women in those countries are sometimes impeccably dressed under their black cloaks, but whether such patterns of dressing (and consumption) reflect a stable situation or one on the verge of change remains unclear.

What is clear, however, is that the shape of Arab media in the future very much depends on the shape of the Arab media market, and that market is dependent on a continued shift toward higher per capita incomes and increasingly Western patterns of consumption. If the media market grows, media outlets will continue to experiment with content to draw more viewers. Arab viewers will likely see more sex and scandal, and political coverage will likely grow more daring, at least in the near and intermediate term (but they will undoubtedly continue to shy away from offending Saudi political sensibilities). Although in the future not all television may resemble LBC or al-Jazeera, the two stations have proved that Arabs thirst for new kinds of programming; meanwhile, the continued high viewership of MBC suggests that even playing things relatively straight can create a powerful media force in the region.

The important thing to keep in mind is that if the media in the Middle East become more market-oriented, they will provide more of what people want to see and read. This will not necessarily be highbrow material, but if the Western experience is any guide, the Arab media will find that pushing boundaries often proves a more successful strategy than staying far away from them.(19) In such a scenario, a more market-oriented Arab media could be expected to be more daring on sex and politics than what has been the case, although one would expect that they would retain some respect for regional mores, at least in the immediate term. If the broadcasts and printed press are too "out there," they merely come across as imports, and that can affect their broad acceptance.

That marketing expenses will rise enough to make broadcasting profitable (or at least to keep losses to an acceptable level) is by no means certain. Persistently low prices for petroleum products will depress the economies not only of the Gulf states, but also of the countries that export labor to those states. Lack of a marketing infrastructure discourages advertising as well. The difficulty this author had in determining even broad ranges of viewerships for leading television programs—and the corresponding difficulty marketers must have in determining who is seeing their advertising and buying their products—is a barrier to increasing advertising expenditures enough to sustain a broad mix of television programming.

In the event that free-to-air stations never become commercially viable, the satellite television market will likely become bifurcated. The first resulting segment would be state-sponsored satellite television. While Qatari-backed al-Jazeera has challenged the status quo, with time and the intervention of governmental interests it seems more likely that the future face of government-sponsored television will be more staid. There will be a strong impetus for states to essentially sign nonaggression pacts regarding their state-run media, and the media will again emerge as the foreign policy tool that they were when Gamal Abdel Nasser first harnessed them in the 1950s and 1960s. Whereas many satellite stations are now based out of Europe, their migration back to the region and increasing government control over their operations will tend to dampen their aggressive news coverage.

The other part of the market likely to survive would comprise the fee-for-service stations like ART and Orbit, driven by high per-user fees and a superior ability to monitor the viewing habits of their wealthy customers. How many such networks the market can sustain and at what level of fees is unclear, but they appear to have identified a way to remain afloat without subsidies from outside parties. For the foreseeable future, these stations seem destined to have their sights fixed mostly on the Saudi market, where incomes are highest (and individuals are most able to pay the requisite fees) and entertainment alternatives the lowest. Whether viewers of such stations will, under the influence of Western-oriented programming, become so unlike their countrymen in dress and speech as to pose a social or political problem for their societies is unclear. Clearly, factors other than television are influencing Arab behavior; still, the January 1997 arrest of seventy-six young adults in Egypt—many of them students at the American University in Cairo—for "satanic practices" influenced by their watching American music videos on satellite television must be a cautionary tale. In many poorer societies in the Arab world, satellite television is contributing to a phenomenon in which some segments of society are educated and oriented in an entirely different way than the mass of their compatriots.(20)

Migration of Production Back to the Region

As an additional result of the increasing market orientation of the Arab media is their likely migration back to the region for at least some of their production. Producing material in high-cost cities like London, New York, and Washington cannot compete economically with the production costs in Amman, Cairo, or possibly Beirut. Of course, many of the regional Arab media have been shaped by their growth outside the Arab world and are more liberal in their approach to social and political affairs than was common heretofore in Arab countries; extraregional production allows them a somewhat greater degree of freedom of expression. Yet, the time will come, sooner rather than later, when economies will induce these organizations to return to the region. Their move will be eased by the generally more open media environment prevailing in the Arab world, especially in the cities mentioned above. Saudi-run organizations will have the most difficult choice to make, however, because the kingdom is among the least open societies in the region, and the efficiencies of doing business there are among the least compelling. Observers may therefore see Saudi-owned companies setting up shop in other Arab countries. ART has already done so with its move to Cairo; al-Hayat maintains a large operation in Cairo and may move the production of some of its pages to Beirut.

The still-nascent Arabic-language internet market lends itself to the offshore basing of operations. Flourishing Jordanian- and Egyptian-based internet consultancies are a sign of how cost-effective it is to design products in one country and sell them in a second, more expensive country. The paying country need not even have an internet link of its own. The government of Iraq maintains web pages in Jordan, and Saudi companies can easily base their web page operations anywhere they wish (even the United States). All of the new media make the location of production secondary to the content of the product itself, and talented editors, writers, announcers, and programmers can work virtually anywhere. TBS

Notes