RADIO AND TELEVISION: ARAB COUNTRIES

Origins and development of radio and television broadcasting in the Arab world.

Most Arab radio and television systems are government-owned, for several reasons. First, Arab governments regard radio and television as potent domestic political instruments because they reach most of the population regardless of literacy and income levels. Moreover, Arab broadcasting underwent its first major expansion during the period after World War II when Arab nationalism and anticolonialism were strong, and governments were very eager to use them for purposes of political nation building and national defense. Governments justified controls on the basis of the alleged need to protect the country against its enemies, old and new. By the same token, radio and television facilities have been prime targets of revolutions seeking to take power, and therefore the governments took special measures to protect them. Third, broadcasting is not a lucrative source of income for commercial investors because commercial advertising in the Arab world, and especially in the electronic media, is relatively limited, and generally advertising revenues do not cover costs. Fourth, governments are concerned about their image as conveyed in other countries through broadcasting so they want to control the programs. There are a few exceptions, especially in Lebanon and among the new satellite television companies, but the norm is government control of electronic broadcasting.

Arab Radio Broadcasting Development

Arab radio broadcasting began in the 1920s, but only a few Arab countries had their own broadcasting stations before World War II. After 1945, most Arab states began to create their own radio broadcasting systems, although it was not until 1970, when Oman opened its radio transmissions, that every one of them had its own radio station.

Among Arab countries, Egypt has been a leader in radio broadcasting from the beginning. Broadcasting began in Egypt in the 1920s with private commercial radio, and in 1934 the government gave the Marconi Company the exclusive right to broadcast. In 1947, however, the Egyptian government declared radio a government monopoly and began investing in its expansion.

By the 1970s, Egyptian radio had fourteen different broadcast services, including six for foreign audiences, staffed by more than 4,500 employees. With a total air time of 1,200 hours per week, Egypt

ranked third in the world among radio broadcasters, The programs were all government controlled, and much of the motivation for the government's investment in radio was due to the aspirations of President Gamal Abdel Nasser to be the recognized leader of the Arab world. Egypt's "Voice of the Arabs" station, which targeted other Arab countries with a constant stream of news and political features and commentaries, became the most widely heard station in the region. Only after the June 1967 war, when it was revealed that this station had misinformed the public about what was happening, did it lose some credibility; nevertheless it retained a sizable listenership.

On the Arabian Peninsula, radio was slower to develop. In Saudi Arabia, radio broadcasts started in the Jidda-Mecca area in 1948, but they did not start in the central or eastern provinces until the 1960s. Neighboring Bahrain had radio by 1955, but Qatar, Abu Dhabi, and Oman did not start indigenous radio broadcasting until nearly a quarter century later.

Arab Television Development

As for television, indigenous television broadcasting in the Arab world first began during the late 1950s, in Iraq and Lebanon. Thirteen other Arab countries followed during the 1960s, but it was not until 1975, when North Yemen inaugurated its television station, that all Arab states had television stations.

Before that, some Arab audiences had begun to be exposed to television from foreign sources. In the North African countries of Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria, where knowledge of the French language was widespread, some of the population was able to watch television broadcast across the Mediterranean from France. In Libya, Arabs living near the U.S. military base at Wheelus were able to watch U.S. television transmitted by the U.S. armed forces, until the base was shut down after the revolution of 1969. In eastern Saudi Arabia some Arabs were able to watch U.S. TV programs broadcast by the U.S.-run Arabian American Oil Company (ARAMCO) located there.

Audiences

Audiences for Arab radio and television have expanded considerably over the years. All Arab countries have passed the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) minimum standard of fifty radio receivers per thousand population, and nearly all of them have passed the UNESCO minimum standard for television receivers of 100 per thousand population, as shown in the table below (worldbank.org and unesco.org, March 2003; data is for 2000, except 1997 for Oman, UAE, Bahrain, and Qatar).

When compared with other less developed areas of the world, these audience rates are roughly equivalent for radio, and they are substantially higher for television. Because multiple listeners and viewers use each radio and television receiver, it is assumed that radio listening is nearly universal among the almost three hundred million Arabs, and that television reaches more than one hundred million of them.

Ownership and Control

When Arab television developed, it was a government monopoly almost everywhere except in Lebanon. During the 1950s, the Lebanese government gave television licenses to two groups of private businesspeople. During the civil war in the 1970s, several private groups and parties started their own unauthorized television stations, but by the 1990s the government had limited the television companies to four, each more or less representing one of the major Lebanese political-religious groups.

During the 1990s, Arab satellite television broadcasting emerged, and it has become the most powerful of all media instruments in the Arab world. In 1990 and 1991, during the Gulf crisis and Gulf War that resulted from Iraq's occupation of Kuwait, the U.S. satellite broadcaster CNN was very widely watched in the Arab world because it provided news and images of developments in the crisis quickly when everyone was eager to know what was happening. Yet CNN's broadcast was in English, and its

electronic media density

	population in millions	radios per 1000	tvs per 1000
Table by GGS Information Services, The Gale Group.
algeria	30	244	110
bahrain	0.7	580	472
egypt	64	399	189
iraq	23	222	83
jordan	4.9	372	84
kuwait	2.0	624	486
lebanon	4.3	687	335
libya	5.3	273	137
morocco	29	243	166
oman	2.4	621	563
qatar	0.6	450	404
saudi arabia	20	319	260
sudan	31	464	273
syria	16	276	67
tunisia	10	158	198
u.a.e.	2.9	318	292
yemen	18	65	283

reporting and editorial judgments presented from a U.S. point of view, and many Arabs wished they had such a service that presented news and events from an Arab point of view and in Arabic. Also, the cost of satellite dishes was becoming lower and therefore within reach of more people. A few wealthy Arabs therefore decided to invest in the creation of Arab satellite television systems; they were willing to invest large sums and to lose money for the prestige and political influence of the new media.

In 1991 Saudi Arabian investors established Middle East Broadcasting (MBC). It was the first private Arab satellite TV station that aimed primarily at a pan-Arab audience. It offered news and entertainment, and soon other investors started to imitate its success. In 1994 two other groups of Saudi investors established two other Arab satellite companies, the Arab Radio and Television Network (ART) and Orbit. MBC, like most of the others, was a free-to-air broadcaster that carried advertising to cover at least part of its costs, but ART and Orbit are fee-based broadcasters that used a coded system accessible only to subscribers. During the next three years, two groups of Lebanese private investors started the satellite stations named Future and Lebanese Broadcasting Company, respectively, and Syrian private investors started Arab News Network. During the same period, the Government of Qatar subsidized the start of a satellite station in
that country that was nominally private, called alJazeera, which became controversial and popular because its programming broke many Arab taboos. Al-Jazeera's discussions and call-in programs frequently include, for example, direct criticism of the policies and specific personalities of several Arab governments, to an extent not heard before in Arab media. In addition, the programs discuss religion and gender in ways rarely dealt with in public.

In the twenty-first century, eight more private satellite television stations have been created, including two owned by Lebanese, three by Egyptians, and one each by Tunisians, Algerians, and Saudis. Meanwhile, most Arab governments got into the act, creating their own satellite television systems alongside their existing terrestrial ones. Even the new satellite companies, although nominally private, tended to operate under some government influence because of legal reasons, financial necessity, and personal connections between owners and government officials.

Palestinian-controlled broadcasting is a special case. For years, Palestinian broadcasters only had access to transmitters outside Palestine and located in other Arab countries, using the government-owned and -controlled transmitters of those countries. During the 1990s, after the Palestinian-Israeli Oslo Accords, radio and television began under the auspices of the Palestinian Authority (PA) and by private individuals. Nevertheless, the PA often restricted the latter, and Israel restricted both.

see also communication.

Bibliography

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Boyd, Douglas A. Broadcasting in the Arab World: A Survey of the Electronic Media in the Middle East, 3d edition. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1999.

El-Nawawy, Mohammed, and Iskander, Adel. Al Jazeera: How the Free Arab News Network Scooped the World and Changed the Middle East. Cambridge, MA: Westview Press, 2002.

Ghareeb, Edmund. "New Media and the Information Revolution in the Arab World." Middle East Journal 54, no. 3 (summer 2000): 402–409.

Rugh, William A. The Arab Press: News Media and Political Process in the Arab World, 2d edition. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1987.

Sakr, Naomi. Satellite Realms: Transnational Television, Globalization and the Middle East. New York and London: I. B. Taurus, 2001.

william a. rugh