"Transnational Media and Social Change in the Arab World"
by Jon B. Alterman
to article page 1 | 2

Notes:

1. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd ed. London: Verso, 1991. p. 44-45.

2. On the subject of the changing "complexion" of Arab reportage, see, for example, Shibley Telhami in Jon B. Alterman, ed., "Sadat and His Legacy: Egypt and the World, 1977-1997 (Washington: The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 1998), p. 98-99.

3. The "Clash of Civilizations" scenario is named after the seminal article of the same name by Samuel Huntington, Foreign Affairs 72, no. 3 (Summer 1993), p. 22-49.

4. The author's favorite anecdote concerning Arab attitudes toward the moral autonomy of the individual is the comment of an Egyptian acquaintance, probably illiterate, who asked if it were true that there were people in America who do not believe in God. Upon learning the affirmative he asked, "What do you do to them?" "Nothing." "You mean you just let them walk in the street?"

5. Eickelman, Dale F. "Inside the Islamic Reformation." Wilson Quarterly (Winter 1998), p. 82.

6. F. Gregory Gause III, "Political Opposition in the Gulf Monarchies," unpublished conference paper, delivered at "The Changing Security Agenda in the Gulf," Doha, Qatar, October 24-26, 1997.

7. The role of a marketplace in helping to determine a product or theory's worth can also be applied to public-sector industries, which are distinguished not by the fact that all were failures but rather by the fact that the ones that were failures were allowed to persist indefinitely because governments had no profit motive to shut them down.

8. Keohane, Robert, and Joseph Nye, Jr. "States and the Information Revolution." Foreign Affairs, September/October 1998, p. 89-90.

9. Brand identity in large part consists of establishing credibility for the consistent performance characteristics of a specific product or family of products.

10. Anyone not familiar with just how brutal the Iraqi regime is would do well to read Samir al-Khalil, "Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq" (London: Hutchinson, 1989).

11. Nora Boustany, "The Loneliest Diplomat," Washington Post, February 18, 1998, p. 17.

12. Examples of Arab academics living in the West but increasingly rejoining the Arab world by way of the new media include but are in no way limited to Professors Cloves Maksoud, Shibley Telhami, and Ibrahim Karawan.

13. Jon W. Anderson, "Middle East Diasporas on the Internet," conference paper, online at linus.isoc.org/inet96/proceedings/e8_2.htm.

14. Jihad Khazen in Abdel Bari Atwan and Jihad Khazen, "In the Saudi Pocket," Index on Censorship 2 (1996), p. 52.

15. Pan-Arab Research Center, “1997 Arab World Advertising Harvest: Ladders and Snakes on the Growth Track, But Slower than Forecasted." [Editor's note: Alterman's point is further confirmed by PARC's November 1998 figures, which show that satellite advertising spending jumped from $202 million in 1997 to over $246 million in 1998 (Chris Forrester in Middle East Broadcast and Satellite, January 1999, p. 4)]

16. Advertising expenditures in pan-Arab magazines rose to $83 million, and in pan-Arab newspapers to $12 million. It is worth noting that in every individual Arab country, spending on newspaper advertising dwarfed that spent on magazines, but in the pan-Arab market, spending on magazine advertising is about six times the level of spending on newspaper advertising. Ibid.

17. Both Pampers and Pantene are brands owned by American consumer giant Procter and Gamble.

18. Ibid.

19. Even if the Arab media become more market-oriented, this is not to say that they will necessarily evolve into a responsible social or political force. In a widely publicized speech at Cornell University in May 1998, MSNBC host Keith Olbermann began by saying, ìI work in television, an industry in which the total number of moral choices may, this year, actually exceed last year's opportunities." Keith Olbermann, "Blame Me, Too," Brill's Content, September 1998, p. 90.

20. The father of one of the arrested Egyptian students complained to the Cairo magazine Ruz al-Yusef, "There is an incapacity among (police) officials to read the facts. They are acting as if they are unaware that this music which they call incriminating is broadcast 24 hours daily on satellite TV." John Daniszewski, Calgary Herald, February 15, 1997, p. C3