Media and the Transformation of Arab Societies
Media and the Transformation of Arab Societies: A
Report on the 4th Annual Beirut Institute for Media Arts Conference, March
16-19, 2004, Beirut
By Iveta Kourilova
The School of Arts & Sciences at the Lebanese American University
hosted on March 16-19, 2004 for the fourth consecutive year a unique media
studies conference organized by its Beirut Institute for Media Arts (BIMA). The
conference was dedicated to the theme of "Media and the Transformation of
Arab Societies." In these times of significant transformation in Arab
societies, many of them a direct consequence of rapid developments in the
media, the theme of this year's meeting was particularly timely.
The hosting institution - the Beirut Institute for
Media Arts - seeks in its various activities to provide a dynamic forum for
collaboration between the academic and professional media communities. As the
field of mass communication becomes increasingly more complex and competitive,
the need for constant cooperation between the media industry and training
becomes more urgent and necessary and the faculty of BIMA is fully aware of
this fact. With an advisory board that includes the chief executives of LBCI,
MBC, Al Jazeera, FTV, MTV, An-Nahar, As-Safir, The Daily Star, as well as the
region's leading advertising agencies and radio stations, BIMA supports a
number of activities that bring together media practitioners, faculty and
students.
The objective of hosting these annual conferences - as
formulated by Dr. Ramez Maaluf, the director of the BIMA - is creating an Arab
venue for the exposition and discussion of Arab media studies. The conferences
are designed to generate and bring to the fore research into the effects of
media on all aspects of Arab societies, focusing on the economic, political, social,
cultural and technological aspects of the media including newspaper, magazine,
radio, television, cable, news agencies, film, satellite broadcasting and the
Internet as well as other mass media industries. Topics covered include issues
of governance, media laws, rules and regulations, developments in freedom of
expression, commercial and non-commercial media systems, ethnicity and
indigenous populations and the media, issues of politics, censorship, ownership
patterns and control, aspects of media professionalism, media and conflict
resolution, gender and communication, issues of Arab media and international
relations and the like.
This year's conference dealt with a wide variety of
media-related issues and provided a much needed forum for academic scholars,
media practitioners, doctoral students and others to discuss issues of
importance involving the Arab world and the transformation of its societies as
a result of media impact on them. Particular attention was paid to important
new developments in the domain of the Internet and new transnational satellite
channels. The participants and attendees from the Arab World, Europe, and the
United States explored issues ranging from the politics of coverage, committed
journalism, and the role of media for Arabs abroad to issues such as media as a
tool of war. The various papers presented new findings from on-going social
science research on uses and impacts of modern technologies in work, leisure,
education, commerce, globalization and transnational ties in the Arab world,
and examined the changing access to communications, production and consumption
of media, the evolving political economy of telecommunications and policy
issues.
Conference participants met in nine full and four
parallel sessions to hear speeches and presentations addressing the above
mentioned issues. Morning panels of media practitioners and other experts
explored the session topic from different perspectives, with a view to
providing new information or original insights. Each session was followed by a
lively discussion in which the topic studied was addressed by a number of
participants. Critical commentaries were offered on the current debates.
On the first afternoon, the conference was opened by
Dr. Ramez Maaluf, the director of the Beirut Institute for Media Arts, who
welcomed the participants and attendees, and presented a brief outline of its
goals. This was followed by the keynote address delivered by Dr. Saad Eddin
Ibrahim, the head of the Ibn Khaldun Center for Development Studies in Cairo and professor of sociology at the American University
in Cairo , who
talked about the freedom of the Arab press.
Then followed three intensive days of presentations and
discussions, during which a number of issues were raised. The first panel of the
conference examined the current state of some of the Lebanese TV stations.
Speakers included Ibrahim Farhat, director of Al Manar TV, Nicolas Abou Samah,
executive of Heya TV, Ihab Hammoud from Future Television and Ramsay Najjar,
Strategic Communication Consultant. The panelists offered interesting
information about their own institutions and provided original insights into
the problems Lebanese media currently confront.
The following session of the conference focused on the
problem of the politics of coverage. Lars Lundsten from the Institute for
Media, Arcada , Finland , contributed to the
discussion with his paper entitled Reporting the "Crusade": A
Rhetoric of Motives, which aimed to initiate a trans-cultural dialogue on the
role of media in shaping Arab and Western ways of understanding each other and
themselves. The presentation contained a number of references to transnational
news reporting from the war against Iraq in 2003, understanding of
which was promoted by American television rhetoric in terms of a crusade. Lars
Lundsten stressed that stated facts have objectively different meaning within
different cultural contexts, and that communicative meaning is dependent on
social and cultural institutions, conventions, the collective beliefs and self-understanding
of collectives. The second presentation devoted to this thematic area was
delivered by Ramez Maaluf, who spoke on the absence of "inspirational
movies" in the Arab film industry, and pointed out an interesting
observation, that the Arabs are constantly, and by their own movies, bombarded
by "failure."
The third session of the conference entitled
"Confronting Modernity" examined recent trends and the future
potential of modern technologies and satellite channels in the Arab world, and
their impact on Arab societies. One of the questions raised was: Are they a
threat - or not? Introduction of the Internet in the Arab world, as well as
elsewhere, was accompanied by great visions and strong fears. The first
speaker, Albrecht Hofheinz from the Center for Modern Oriental Studies, Berlin , sought in his
paper for answers to the following questions: Does the Internet contribute to
value changes and to strengthening democratic publics in Arab societies? Will
the net contribute to enhancing possibilities for democratic participation in
public debate and decision-making? Or will it rather lead to cultural
homogenization, transporting mostly Western values and helping to undermine
other cultures? Albrecht Hofheinz approached these questions from the angle of
majority use and presented analysis of what majority activities on the net
consist of in the Arab world, what themes and ideas are particularly popular,
and whether there are social and political trends especially evident on the
net. He focused in particular on studying the Egyptian, Moroccan, and Sudanese
case and presented important similarities to and significant differences from
other countries. He concluded by suggesting that the greatest transformative
potential of the Internet for the public sphere may lie not in its helping
civil society organizations vis-à-vis the state, but in its enhancing a sense
of individual autonomy.
Within the framework of this session, Tim Walters from Shaykh Zayed
University looked in his
paper at when, where, and how female Emirati students use television and the
Internet and what they are looking for as they use it. Among Tim Walters'
surprising findings are that these women live a highly mediated existence,
media occupying more than 9.9 hours on average of their day. He pointed out
that these students are traversing radically different communications pathways
than their parents - a generation much more intimately connected through
interpersonal communication. Making a switch-over from the Internet to the
satellite television channels, the next speaker, Hana Nahas from the City
University of London, examined whether satellite television channels can push
an agenda for political change in the Middle East .
The afternoon session of that day featured
presentations on "Media and Arabs Abroad." Judith Brown from Exeter University
showed in her presentation how Arabs are acting, interacting and reacting to
the British media. She underlined different attitudes of the new British Arab
population and mentioned the recent appearance of properly managed press
offices in Arab embassies in London ,
and the media-monitoring group, which encourages its members to respond to
negative and inaccurate reports and to thank journalists who express a
sympathetic viewpoint. The next speaker, Christoph Schumann from the University
of Erlangen-Nuremberg, then described and analyzed two models of Diaspora
press: the Arab-American press in the U.S.
and the Turkish press in Germany .
The Canadian state of affairs was elucidated by Fadi Zeidan from Quebec , who spoke on emigration and the media in Canada and the U.S. in the last ten years, and
also by John Asfour, the chair of the Advisory Committee for Canadian
Multi-Culturalism on Arab & Moslem Affairs, who presented a further
Canadian case study.
The BIMA conference ended its first day with a
wonderful Lebanese style dinner, where two of the conference participants, Rami
Khouri (The Daily Star) and Bruce Kennedy (WABE 90.1 FM Atlanta) delivered the
dinner address.
The second day of the conference was opened by a panel
debate on committed journalism. Among the panelists were several Lebanese
journalists: Talal Salman from As Safir, Edmond Saab from An Nahar and Rami
Khouri from The Daily Star. Similarly to the previous day morning session,
which introduced to the attendees the Lebanese television channels, this was an
opportunity to get more information on the Lebanese press.
The following session discussed television's different
responsibilities. The session opened with a presentation by Rawan Damen from
the University of
Leeds , who started off
the session by presenting a horizontal case study of Al Jazeera Channel that
examined and verified the hypothesis of the absence of real and
thought-provoking educational debates on the main pan-Arab television stations.
The second speaker of the session, Becky Schulthies from the University of Arizona ,
delivered an anthropological study of media reception in Morocco . Her
paper aimed at filling the existing gap and providing linguistic analyses in
the frame of ethnographic studies of media's impact on relations between local
and global "imagined communities." Her paper merged the ethnography
of media reception with careful linguistic analysis of domestic discourse in
order to understand Moroccan family interpretive processes as they relate to
viewing practices. The main question addressed was: How are media scripts
contributing to Arab domestic dialogues and interpretations of current
transnational events? Christa Salamandra, a Fulbright fellow at the Lebanese American University ,
on the other hand, presented ethnographic approaches to Syrian TV drama.
The afternoon session of the second day of the
conference paid particular attention to media as a tool of war. John Merrill,
professor of Journalism at the American
University in Cairo , suggested - among other things -
several points about what the Western media can do to give a good face to
democratization, but at the same time indicated that they might be in favor of
the status quo. Ibrahim Marashi from Oxford
University , who delivered a paper
entitled An Assessment of the Role of Media in "Operation Iraqi
Freedom," pointed out that the media's failure to understand Iraq 's history
and politics led to many miscalculations of how "Operation Iraqi
Freedom" would evolve, and how the Iraqi people would react to the
American presence.
Joe Khalil then described in his paper how the Arab
channels (Al Jazeera, Al Arabiya and Abu Dhabi TV) fought for the Gulf war
audience. He analyzed their strategy to prove themselves worthy of viewers'
attention, and, most importantly, to claim leadership in news coverage.
Studying the individual organizational cultures and tactical strategies of
these channels, he tried to investigate how they had found ways to accommodate
their alliances and need for promotion. The study addressed how Arab channels
used their financial, technical, and editorial resources to produce a news
product that might attract their target audience, while simultaneously
considering both the internal and external factors that influenced their
strategies.
The last Thursday session, entitled "The Framework
of Media," was opened by Ralph Berenger, an assistant professor of
journalism and mass communication at the American
University in Cairo ,
who spoke on media behavior in the Middle East
focusing on 2003 Gulf War. The goal of the delivered lecture was to lay the
theoretical and conceptual groundwork to better understand global media's
reporting behavior before, during, and after the 2003 Gulf War. The speaker
stressed how personal biases inculcate the information in stories reporters
choose to write and broadcast, which ultimately impacts the way audiences come
to view an event. After that Bruce Kennedy (News Director, WABE 90.1 FM
Atlanta) presented his Comparing News Coverage paper, demonstrating his
statements by a number of news recordings. The last speaker of the session,
Katharina Nötzold from the University of Erfurt, Germany, sought to offer a
comparison of the developments in the pan-Arab satellite channels to the local
Lebanese stations. She based her study on a series of very interesting
quantitative and qualitative content analyses conducted on Lebanese newscasts.
The last day of the conference opened with a session
focusing on different particulars. It included and covered a variety of topics.
In his talk, Nabil Dajani from the American
University of Beirut offered a critical reading of Arab
information. Mazin Motabagani from Al Madinah Center for the Study of
Orientalism devoted his paper to the BBC's relation to orientalism. In one of
the most interesting presentations, Ali Awad from Al Sharjah University
examined the women's press in the Arab world and pointed out several paradoxes
related to this theme. The last speaker of the session, Hanan Yousef from Ain
El Shams University, analyzed in her paper the role of Arab media in non-Arab
lands, taking into account the international changes that had occurred in
recent years.
During the following session, participants presented
papers focused mostly on such issues as "Bias" and "Media and
Governments." Kamal Abou Chedid from the Notre Dame University, Lebanon,
opened this session by presenting his paper entitled Info-Bias Mechanism and
American College Students Attitudes Towards Arabs, which examined-with negative
images indicating a considerable degree of stereotyping against Arabs, and
counter-stereotypes that indict Americans of having negative stereotypes about
Arabs due to media bias-the extent to which American college students believe
the American media provides them with useful information about Arabs and the
Arab world.
Lina Khatib from the University
of London explored in her paper Hollywood , Egyptian
Cinema, and the Arab-Israeli Conflict Hollywood's and Egyptian cinema's
construction of the Arab-Israeli conflict. It showed how those cinematic
representations revealed the difficulty of applying traditional cultural
theories to the conflict. Lina Khatib analyzed the conflict's representation in
Hollywood and
compared the findings with Egyptian cinema's focuses. She argued that the
American and Egyptian representations of the conflict ultimately served
nationalist agendas, emphasizing the role of the US
as a world leader on one hand, and that of Egypt as a crucial Arab player on
the other hand. We were fortunate to watch during the presentation some
extracts of those films illustrating Lina Khatib's statements and conclusions.
The next speaker, Dalia Shams from Al Ahram Hebdo, Cairo , raised in her presentation the
following question: What kind of heroes are conquering Arab audiences?
The session continued with Yousuf Al Humaid Al
Suwaidi's (Australian
National University
/ Dubai Courts) study of the role of media in assisting trial court
performance. His paper examined the issue of a clear choice for fair trial over
free or restricted press along with how courts could assess both the risks and
benefits to be gained from the electronic media before permitting coverage of
courts proceedings. After that, Dima Dabbous-Sensenig from Lebanese American
University presented a
study on the role of legislation play in structuring societal change. She
examined the relationship between the introduction of broadcast legislation in Lebanon and the
rule of law in the country after the end of the civil war. After examining all
the phases of the regulatory process, she questioned the effectiveness of the
democratic process that led to the promulgation and later implementation of the
law, and the extent to which this measure, as one of several others, indeed
introduced the rule of law in post civil-war Lebanon .
Finally, James Redman from the University of Utah
spoke on Kurdish broadcasting's challenge to Turkish media hegemony. He
stressed that European-based satellite stations became a powerful antithesis to
the Republic's control over media content, and that incorporating traditional
symbols of authority into their programming such as anthems, flags and newsroom
maps of Kurdistan , these telecasts developed
into state television without a state. The paper addressed this socio-political
phenomenon and what it means for the nations involved, the Kurds and the Turks.
On the final afternoon of the conference, during the
closing plenary, the participants, attendees and members of the audience of the
4th annual BIMA conference summarized the current state, lessons learned, and
prospects for future. Several speakers provided some closing remarks and
reflections on the meeting and its outcomes. Overall, the conference proved
that there is indeed a lot of happening in the field of Arab media studies and
was truly informative, covering a wide range of topics related to the Arab
media and featuring a number of new and interesting findings. TBS
-------------------------------------------------
Iveta Kourilova teaches Arabic, Modern Islamic Society,
and Leading Islamic Thinkers courses at theUniversity of West Bohemia in Pilsen , Czech
Republic . She is also affiliated with the
Oriental Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences.
تعليقات
إرسال تعليق