Al Arabiya
Media coverage of the popular uprisings sweeping the Arab world has revived debate about what role should the Fourth Estate—in its print, broadcast and electronic iterations—play in Arab society.
While print media’s role as a credible source of information and insightful analysis has dwindled over the years—due mainly to continuing government control in most countries of the 22-member Arab League—broadcast and electronic media have emerged in the “Arab Spring” not only as sources of information but, sometimes more, as conduits or vehicles of social change.
During an Arab media forum recently held in Kuwait to discuss the trends in media coverage of Arab revolutions, Abdel Wahab Badrakhan, a noted journalist and author, said that broadcast TV channels were the most prominent during the Arab uprisings. He was, of course, referring to the two most popular networks, Al Arabiya (which is privately owned) and Al Jazeera (which is funded by the Emir of Qatar).
Mr. Badrakhan said that increased role of electronic media over the last several months was not only due to increased users but more to a reliance of TV broadcasters on electronically-communicated information to deepen their coverage of the socio-political developments.
Some of major Arab TV broadcasters, such as Al Arabiya TV, were either temporarily suspended or were subject to jamming in Libya, Egypt and Syria, prompting them to rely on videos and information communicated via the Internet.
Not all views concerning the mass media have been supportive.
For example, the editor-in-chief of the al-Liwaa daily newspaper, Salah Salam, said some prominent news media “fabricated some testimonies to mislead the public opinion.”
Mr. Salam added, however, that other media outlets were more committed to obtaining and spreading credible information.
Akram Khozam, a prominent journalist at Al-Hurra TV (which is sponsored by the United States Government), said during the forum in Kuwait that some Arab broadcast TV channels were more concerned about influencing the course of events, even if they carried flawed reporting, than covering the developments from an independent and unbiased angle.
While such views will undoubtedly continue to shape the debate on the role of the mass media in the Arab world, commentators and academics will increasingly turn to examining how the “social media”—Twitter and Facebook, in particular—shape social and political change.
In a classic sense, these vehicles represent “vox populi” because they are a verbal way of mobilizing and transmitting genuine voices of everyday people.
But such mobilization can carry hazards: What if there are no filters to shape social and political debate? Can the sheer momentum of popular discussions project and propel misguided ideas about change? What are the built-in safety measures to protect those being accused in the growing courts of global public opinion? Is there recourse for those whose names get tarnished? How do falsely accused people restore their tarnished reputations?
And perhaps the central question: If mass media shapes social and political and even economic change, what happens to existing institutions of governance?
These are heavy issues, ones that will have a powerful impact on the level of societal discourse in the months and years ahead in the Arab world.
(Publish in english.alarabiya.net April 30, 2011)
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