News Media in the Arab World News Media in the Arab World A study of 10 Arab and Muslim countries EditEd by bARRiE GUNtER ANd ROGER diCKiNSON NEW YORK • LONDON • NEW DELHI • SYDNEY Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 1385 Broadway 50 Bedford Square New York London NY 10018 WC1B 3DP USA UK www.bloomsbury.com First published 2013 © Barrie Gunter, Roger Dickinson, and Contributors 2013 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury Academic or the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data News media in the Arab world: a study of 10 Arab and Muslim countries / edited by Barrie Gunter and Roger Dickinson. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4411-1407-5 (hardcover: alk. paper) – ISBN 978-1-4411-7466-6 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. Journalism – Arab countries. 2. Press – Arab countries. 3. Television broadcasting of news – Arab countries. 4. Broadcast journalism – Arab countries. 5. Reporters and reporting – Arab countries. 6. Journalism – Objectivity – Arab countries. 7. Mass media – Arabic countries. I. Gunter, Barrie editor of compilation. II. Dickinson, Roger 1956 – editor of compilation. PN5359.N49 2013 073.927–dc23 2012050838 E ISBN: 978-1-4411-0239-3 Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India Contents About the contributors vii 1 The Changing Nature of News and the Arab World 1 Barrie Gunter and Roger Dickinson 2 Evolving News Systems in the Gulf Countries 21 Khalid Al-Jaber and Barrie Gunter 3 News in Iraq 41 Ahmed Al-Rawi and Barrie Gunter 4 The Development of the Palestinian News Media 65 Zaki Hasan Nuseibeh and Roger Dickinson 5 News Consumption and News Agendas in Egypt 83 Hamza Mohammed and Barrie Gunter 6 The Changing News Landscape of Libya 109 Mokhtar Elareshi and Julian Matthews 7 News Developments and Changes to News Consumption Patterns in the Arab World 135 Khalid Al-Jaber and Barrie Gunter vi CONtENtS 8 News Media and Political Socialization of Young People: The Case of Bahrain 153 Ebrahim Abdulrahman Al-Shaikh and Vincent Campbell 9 What Is the Future for News in the Arab World? 173 Roger Dickinson and Barrie Gunter Index 189 About the contributors the contributors comprise academic members of staff at the Department of Media and Communication, University of Leicester and a number of Arab authors who are current (Al-Shaikh,) or recent (Al-Jaber, Al-Rawi, Elareshi, Mohammed, Nussibeh) students at the department. Three of the latter (Al-Shaikh, Elareshi, Mohammed) are academics in their own coun- tries where they teach about media and communication, and the other two (Al-Jaber, Nuseibeh) are journalists. The writing team therefore embraces experienced academic authors and members with specialist knowledge of media in the Arab world. Khalid Al-Jaber is the research director of The Peninsula, an Arabic daily news- paper in Qatar. Al-Jaber’s interest and expertise are in communication research spanning a wide range of areas from global media organizations to inter- national communication, mass media in Middle East and Arab Gulf region, and public diplomacy. He studied for his PhD at the Department of Media and Communication, University of Leicester between 2009 and 2012. Ebrahim Abdulrahman Al-Shaikh is a PhD student of Media in the Department of Media and Communication, University of Leicester. He has also been employed as a journalist by Akbhar Al-Kaleej, an Arabic daily newspaper in Bahrain. He is interested in political and cultural communication issues in the Middle East, par- ticularly in the Arab Gulf region. Vincent Campbell is a lecturer in the Department of Media and Communication. He is the author of Information Age Journalism: Journalism Studies in International Context (Arnold, 2004) and has written journal articles, books chapters and other publications on journalism and political communication. Among his specialist areas of interest are international political communication and the relationship between journalism, new media and politics. Roger Dickinson is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Media and Communication at the University of Leicester. His research interests include the sociology of journalists and journalism, the study of media audiences and the media and health. His most recent work on journalists and journalism viii AbOUt tHE CONtRibUtORS has appeared in Journalism Studies, Cultural Sociology, Journalism, Theory, Practice and Criticism and The Routledge Companion to Journalism Studies (edited by Stuart Allan). Mokhtar Elareshi obtained his PhD at the Department of Media and Communication, University of Leicester in 2012. His thesis was based on research on the impact of international satellite TV news services on the consumption of indigenous news services in Libya. He has taught at the University of Libya, Tripoli. Barrie Gunter is a Professor of Mass Communication, Department of Media and Communication. He is an author of 50 books and more than 250 journal articles, book chapters and other publications on media, marketing and man- agement issues. Among his specialist areas of interest are media audiences, new media developments and the impact of news. Julian Matthews is a Lecturer in the Department of Media and Communication at the University of Leicester. He is the Communication and Media Section Editor for the international journal Sociology Compass and is a Convenor of the British Sociological Association Media Study Group. His research inter- ests include the production of news, journalism and its representations of health, the environment and other social issues. He has published work in a range of academic journals. Hamza Mohammed obtained his PhD from the Department of Media and Communication, University of Leicester in 2008. He has worked as a journalist and in public relations in the Middle East and currently teaches at the University of Sharjah. His research interests centre on news and agenda-setting. Zaki Hasan Nuseibeh is a Palestinian journalist, teacher and writer. He has worked in the Palestinian news industry since 1974. He holds a BA degree in Arabic Language and Literature from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and an MA in Mass Communications from the University of Leicester. 1 The Changing Nature of News and the Arab World Barrie Gunter and Roger Dickinson News markets are evolving dramatically in the Middle East and across North Africa. The emergence of the internet and of satellite television (TV) news channels has changed the media landscape in these countries and provided new media experiences for the indigenous populations. New media have been embraced in particular by younger people in the Arab world. These changes have implications for the way news businesses are run and regu- lated in the region. They have created greater competition for audiences and placed some established news providers under threat. These initial tasters have whetted public news appetites across the Arab world and created a hunger for less parochial news coverage. Whether this is seen as good or not varies between countries. The news is important to Arab populations, but the question of what now constitutes valued news has become more open as wider choices of news have been made available. Even though the media landscape in Arab world has changed dramati- cally since the end of the twentieth century, characterized in particular by the emergence of TV satellite channels and penetration of the Internet, there is still a disjunction between the promises carried by these technology devel- opments and the realities of Arab politics and societies (Amin, 2001). One media typology has distinguished between the mobilized press controlled by government, loyalist press that is privately owned yet loyal to the cur- rent government and therefore succumbs to direct or indirect government