Related Resources

Jihad Ballout, Director of Media Relations for the Al-‘Arabiya satellite news channel, talked about the changes in Arab television and news gathering over the last ten years, and the future of what he called “new Arab media.” Ballout pointed out that, since the launch of the BBC’s now defunct Arabic news channel in 1994, there has been an unprecedented proliferation of Arabic news and entertainment satellite channels. Al-‘Arabiya’s researchers predict that there will be 250 Arab satellite channels broadcasting all over the world by 2007.

The greatest achievement of new Arab media, Ballout said, was to take away the state’s total control of news and information about domestic as well as international issues. Arab satellite channels have opened up debate across the Middle East, bringing social and political issues once censored by state-run media to the forefront, which has given governments in the region two options: either to “play ball” with the satellite channels in order to make official opinions heard, or to put up obstacles to hamper the channels’ effectiveness. Ballout cautioned that the decision by Middle East leaders to “play ball” should be viewed with skepticism. The tendency of governments around the world to “come in the back door” to promote their views on supposedly independent news outlets, as has happened with the re-launch of the BBC, Telesur, and certain Russian news channels, should be closely monitored to prevent it from happening in the Middle East.

Along with the positive developments for the people of the Middle East, the new Arab media has also offered the West a new window through which to observe the region and its people, and the view is not one the West has enjoyed taking in. The launch by the United States of the Al-Hurra and Sawa networks to counter what it sees as anti-US, anti-Western propaganda by networks like Al-‘Arabiya and Al-Jazeera, is a non-starter, Ballout said. Ballout emphasized the fact that the Arab public knows Al-Hurra and Sawa are connected to the US government, and that Arabs therefore associate the networks and their reporters with an antagonistic force, which makes the success of these outlets unlikely. Ballout said that what the Arab world is looking for is not repackaging of US policy and ideas, but a fundamental rethinking of that policy. Ballout noted that it was legitimate for the US to try and influence “hearts and minds” through their own Arabic language broadcasts, but that ultimately these efforts, if not tied to a change in US policy towards the Middle East, were doomed to fail.

Addressing the role of the Arab media in the Danish cartoon affair, Ballout noted that Al-‘Arabiya had covered it extensively, and had gone to some length to present various views on the matter. Al-‘Arabiya, he said, was the first news organization to invite the Danish Prime Minister to appear on a debate show with a Muslim cleric as well as a Danish Muslim. Ballout defended freedom of the press as a “sacrosanct” principle that must be “embraced and defended,” but noted that with such freedom comes with responsibility, for both the East and the West. The media should put events in context and examine the repercussions of any and every story, not just for East-West relations, but for the Middle East region as well. Ballout said he perceived not only frustration and anger in the violence arising from the publication of the cartoons, but the hand of governments trying to hijack the sentiment for their own gain, deflecting criticism westward, instead of on the regimes themselves, just as some Western political movements had used the violence to highlight what they perceive as East-West incompatibility. Ballout said he saw Al-‘Arabiya’s role as not to provide a platform for inflaming sentiment, yet to inform and appeal to its viewership.