The turbulent events which the Arab region has witnessed in recent
months played a major role in making the Arab old and young once again
interested in the Arab media, which is now required to present lively scenes of
what is taking place.
It is thus forced to give up
old policies which used to please the authorities at the cost of the public,
who have become angry, looking for facts, rejecting falsification and
circumlocution. Has the Arab media really succeeded in this endeavour? Has the
Arab uprisings made Arab visual and print media regain its real role in
developing Arab public awareness? Does it need further public and elite
uprisings to recover its real role?
The above questions are today relevant, even pressing, in the light
of Britain s recent media scandal involving a major media organization. The
phone-hacking scandal in which the News of the World weekly was implicated made
headline news over the last few weeks, causing closure of the paper. The
incident had implications on the political system in Britain as the British
prime minister was questioned in the House of Commons, in addition to
implications for visual and print media worldwide.
Arab Implications
What are the implications as far as our Arab press and media are
concerned, particularly in terms of credibility as well as the responsibility
of our media organizations for developing Arab societies awareness?
Since the spread of satellite and private channels and private
press in the Arab world over the past decade, types of a media circus and lurid
headlines have become common at the cost of objectivity and truth, often
carrying unsubstantiated rumours and insignificant matters. This poses
important questions about the reality of such media practices and whether they
are designed to damage Arab awareness and mind, in addition to fabricating
false reports, scandals and charges.
Looking at satellite channels shows that the majority are one of
these types: oriented news, shallow religious, or variety/song/ entertainment,
with exaggeration and more sensational than serious material. The oriented news
type is dominated by a certain ideology and political attitudes, and even talk
shows lack real dialogue or a serious discussion of a topic and are like a
dialogue of the deaf, with the guests exchanging charges and abuses as if they
were in a wrestling, or even bullfighting, ring.
The so-called religious type is mostly engaged in insignificant
issues and superstitions or focuses on such things as oneiromancy and presents
new preachers who deal with superficial matters, claiming that in this way they
attract the youth to religious values. As a matter of fact, what these channels
present is nothing but chatter and light discourse, far from being a discussion
of serious matters which address the minds of the youth and tell them about
Islamic civilization in its heyday when Muslims were leaders in knowledge and
science and promotion of the values of reason and civilization.
The most popular, the variety type helps spread triviality and
superficiality in Arab societies and is interested in gossip and the news of
singers and actors at the expense of any artistic values which develop artistic
or cultural taste. Some of the programmes are sometimes nothing but a copy or
translation of Western ones, regardless of the cultural, moral and value
differences.
In this way, many things are absent from Arab media: all that
builds real awareness through documentaries which introduce great Arab
civilization, the West s daily scientific advances or even Arab scientific
effort, however little or rare it may be, high arts which develop artistic
taste and critical thinking, the Arab nation s history, heritage, culture and
literature (with few exceptions) as well as almost deliberate neglect of
Arabic, the raison d être of this nation.
Lack of immunity!
In point of fact, this general Arab media climate has contracted
many of the ills of the West s tabloids, with a profound difference:public
awareness. The recent phone-hacking scandal has undermined Rupert Murdoch s
press conglomerate because the West public have lost confidence in the paper
and the publisher and welcomed the closure of the almost 170-year-old paper
(News of the World, which first appeared in1843, and it had a weekly
circulation of 2.5m in Britain alone). The paper was closed despite its weight
in the media world, in addition to Britain s legal system which deals with the
cases which mislead the public.
It is not strange or curious in the Arab world today to see press
conglomerates which misdirect awareness, e.g. the prestigious Al-Ahram daily
(over 100 years old) which tampered with a photo published by all international
media. The matter went unheeded, but the paper lost credibility for the first
time in its long history.
Today, at the height of Arab revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria,
Libya or Yemen, two adjacent news channels, or even the same channel, broadcast
two contradictory news items. Which will the public trust? Doesn t such
contradiction lead to loss of trust in these forums? Isn t this compelling
evidence that the Arab media has become just a tool in the hands of interest
groups, even foreign ones, who still want to interfere in the region s internal
affairs in favour of their political and economic interests?
Such contradiction, superficiality and indifference in handling the
news and absence of accurate, serious content in the Arab media have made it a
tool of confusion and misleadingness rather than true facts and background
information. Many channels broadcast the same image but with a different
content, in addition to fabricating images and sounds.
Media fraud and the role of the state
Such facts and contradictions prose a key question about the
responsibility of the state for protecting individuals from media fraud,
assigning authorities to deal with information flow and misleading political
propaganda. What are the professional and ethical criteria to be adopted by the
Arab media? What s the difference, e.g., between commercial fraud by way of
selling food that is unfit for human consumption and media fraud? Isn t the
latter more harmful to citizens minds and lifestyles?
The test which the Arab media has recently undergone proved that
its role needs to be redefined to restore its real purpose which is supposed to
have credibility, inform citizens of true facts in an honest manner. Its key
role should develop critical thinking and reason rather than produce confused,
sceptical minds with no self-confidence or trust in the authorities and the
media.
The main problem of the Arab media is that it emerged in the
post-independence era when it was required to play a key role in deepening
citizens sense of independence and developing a nationalist personality full of
self-confidence and national trust. The media was also required in particular
to promote development, inform the public of the realities of the new sate,
arouse national and pan-Arab sentiments and engage citizens in the
responsibility for building the nation at all levels.
But this role was gradually blown off its course, and the term
directed media has become a notorious one, replacing its key role of national
guidance with a new one producing an almost halo of reverence of the ruling
authority, making it a source of inspiration above criticism and
accountability. The Arab media used the traditions of Arab patriarchal
societies to formulate and cultivate these concepts in people s minds, as seen
at the height of the Arab uprisings, particularly in Egypt when some condemned
the trial of the president on the grounds that he is the father of all Egyptians!
Following the rise of independent papers and private channels the
Arab media and press began a period of talk shows which led ultimately to the
above-mentioned three news, religious and variety types, clearly showing that
the Arab media copies many Western models which distorted it as it is no longer
original or at least does not observe the Western media s historical
conditions. In this way the political and religious media has become a
profitable business which attracts all those who have money and prestige
through starting a paper or a channel to serve their political, religious and
primarily financial interests.
Fixed historical positions
The Western media has a longer history than that of the Arab press
and media. It is known that the first paper appeared in around the year 1465,
and newspapers have been printed regularly since then. In the true sense of the
word, newspapers took their real shape at the beginning of the 16th century,
and regular newspapers spread in Europe and America in the17th and 18th
centuries as some persons took up journalism as a career. The French Revolution
prompted the appearance of modern journalism, and the print, then the visual
media, succeeded in establishing the traditions of credibility, integrity and
respect for the public as it appeared in a different climate and in nations
which experienced popular revolts earlier and fostered democratic and liberal
values which encouraged reason and individualism later, all of which is absent
from our Arab societies.
It is true that the history of the Arab media dates back to the19th
century when Journal Iraq was published in Arabic and Turkish by Baghdad
Governor Dawud Pasha in 1816. During Napoleon s 1798 campaign against Egypt two
French newspapers appeared in Cairo, and in 1828 Muhammad Ali Pasha published
the Egyptian Gazette, and the newspaper Syria was published in Damascus in
1867. The Arab press movement gathered momentum steadily and the number of Arab
papers (including dailies, weeklies and monthlies) in the absence of accurate
figures, is nearly one thousand. The number of satellite channels is about
1,500 (subject to verification). Despite these large numbers, the Arab media
lacks professionalism, objectivity and credibility.
In addition, though trying to present material that seems to be
neutral (i.e. not oriented), the independent Arab media in the final analysis
is governed by the interests of the owner of the organization, and in many
instances, as seen in recent years, people who have nothing to do with the
media enter the area of investment in the media and impose conditions designed
to attract the public by any means whatever trite it may be. Accordingly,
satellite channels are filled with trivial and highly sensational or lurid
programmes which promote certain values of corruption. Many investors have also
entered the area of drama production only designed to fill hours of
transmission, and thus boost profit, with no useful content or artistic value.
Censorship and spoiling citizens minds
Among the serious weaknesses of the Arab press and media is the
problem of censorship and curtailment of the freedom of the press. According to
Correspondents without Limits reports a third of the world s population live in
countries where there is no freedom of the press, and the majority live in
countries with no democratic systems or with fatal flaws in the democratic
process, as freedom of the press is a highly problematic concept in most of
these regimes, particularly in view of the fact that access to information in
modern times is vital to the survival of undemocratic regimes. To this end,
most undemocratic societies use state-run news agencies to provide a political
support base (often brutal, using police, military and intelligence agencies)
to quash any attempt by the media or individuals to disagree with the party
line in controversial matters.
What must be subject to censorship, particularly on satellite
channels, is all that dulls awareness and misquides. This may be the real task
of the censor and not just cutting scenes of kisses or indecent women s
clothes. But how far censorship still is from such media demagogy which
misdirects the youth s minds!
The new stage which the Arab region is currently passing through
requires new types of serious, credible media, particularly as showing a lot of
platitude on TV by way of song videoclips, movies or drama on the pretext that
it is public demand has proved to be false. The public felt frustration and
despair for years and never felt they lived in a real homeland where they
choose their rulers with their free will, and, accordingly a state of
negativism prevailed which led producers to make such false allegations. That
the public are after transparency, credibility and good taste has been proved
by the current Arab relentless uprisings in which the public call for regaining
lost freedom and basic rights, including the right to such media that shows
consideration for their minds.
Sulaiman
Al-Askary
No comments:
Post a Comment