What is ‘global’ about Arab media?

Arab Television in Academic Scholarship

“…Of course, some of these trends have to do with an increasing freedom of expression, some with the desire to make money and recognize media as an arena from which to get rich (whether one is a TV station owner, a pop star or an Islamic reverend). As such, the more theoretically nuanced works by Naomi Sakr (2001, 2007a, 2007b), Tarik Sabry (2005, 2007), Basyouni Hamada (2004), and Kai Hafez (2001, 2007) are welcomed contributions to the discussion about how we are to complicate our understanding of media and globalization – in the Arab world and elsewhere.…”

“…One can categorize critical scholarship about Al Jazeera into three threads, all implicitly or explicitly responding to the simplistic mainstream view of a ‘clash of civilizations’, analyzing the following: first, Al Jazeera's political (or ‘civilizational’ to follow Huntington) allegiance in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, discussed in Miles (2005), Rushing (2007), Seib (2005), and Lynch (2006) – although the authors do not themselves believe in a ‘clash’, they provide convincing counter‐argument to the post‐911 label of Al Jazeera being ‘Bin Laden's mouthpiece’; second, whether and how Al Jazeera is a catalyst and forum for a ‘new’ public sphere (most notably Rinnawi 2006, and Lynch 2006); and third, Al Jazeera's credibility as a ‘Westernized’ or ‘global’ media channel (El‐Nawawy and Iskander 2002; Zayani 2005; Zayani and Sahraoui 2007), or more critically, whether a pan‐Arab channel can truly be considered ‘global’ (Sabry 2005). Hugh Miles’ Al‐Jazeera (2005) and Josh Rushing's Mission Al Jazeera (2007) are ‘insider’ accounts of the station's history and organization; although Faisal Al‐Kasim (1999), host of the widely popular and studied Al Jazeera talk show, The Opposite Direction , provides his own views on the show's regional impact.…”

“…The critical scholarship recognizes the multifariousness of programs and viewpoints available on TV, the polysemic nature of media interpretation, and the necessity of connecting shifts in media to real shifts on the ground (whether in harmful US involvement in the region, in authoritarian regimes continuing their hegemonic hold over oppositional groups, or the rise of those oppositional viewpoints in various locales and among different people), telling us interesting stories not only about what is on TV, but about contemporary Arab society and politics. Some of the scholars mentioned above, who take a critical, grounded, contextualized analysis of Arab media are gaining ground (most notably Armbrust 1996, 2000, 2006; Sabry 2005, 2007; Sakr 2007b; Stein and Swedenburg 2005), along with journals such as Arab Media & Society and the soon‐to‐be‐launched Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication . Here, research focuses on some of the following issues (by no means exhaustive): the relationship between identity formation and/or national consciousness and media use; the dialectics between nationalism, modernity and Arab classicism; popular culture as sites of contestation; the connection between popular culture and questions of power and politics; the balance between conservative nationalist imagery and a modernist ethic; the shifting politics of media products through a historical (or at times ethnographic) perspective; tensions between consumer desires and the place of Islam; gender and social inequalities; how popular culture creates news scales of communication and new dimensions of identity; the long‐standing trans‐national aspects of Arab societies (through the lens of colonialism and post‐colonialism) that challenge assumptions about the region's isolation or backwardness in its relation to the West; the ways in which the cultural terrain articulates with broader social forces and political economic processes.…”