by Lin Noueihed
Ten years and a technological revolution later, Syrian activists harnessed Facebook and Twitter to criticize the regime and rally protesters. Though Syria still has one of the most regulated internet and telecoms sectors in the Middle East,4 demonstrators could take shaky footage on camera phones, once an expensive gimmick but now cheap and ubiquitous, and upload it for free onto video-sharing sites. The arrival of third-generation telecoms services in Syria in 2009 also meant images could be instantly shared with the world, albeit at an exorbitant price.5
Activists smuggled in satellite phones, considered to be espionage equipment by the Syrian government, to get around state closures of mobile phone networks or the internet. Net-savvy internet users used proxies and mirror sites and worked with fellow activists abroad to bypass state censorship. Activist groups such as Shaam News Network,6 which claims to have no party affiliation or foreign backing, were dedicated entirely to collecting evidence of protests and alleged state brutality and disseminating it to the world in both English and Arabic. The message could be spread instantly and anonymously to reach a far larger audience than dissidents could have hoped for with their printed leaflets, their faxes, or even their e-mails, just a decade earlier.
The Arab Spring may have taken the world by surprise in 2011, but another upheaval had long been underway in the region. It was a media revolution that, through satellite television and the internet, had connected people from the Atlantic to the Gulf like never before, had smashed political taboos, had eroded the cults of personality nurtured by authoritarian rulers from Damascus to Tripoli, and had helped to empower civil society movements that are the bedrock of democracy.
Breaking Taboos
The arrival of satellite television in the Arabic language took the region by storm, boosting access to information, breaking taboos, bringing the Arab world closer together and powering a whole new industry of writers, actors, directors and producers of dramas, comedies, game shows, music videos and news for television. Combined with rising literacy, falling birth rates and a young generation raised on the internet and coming of age, satellite television was part of a cultural revolution that had taken place across the Arabic-speaking world in the decade leading up to 2011.
Since the 1950s, controlling the media in Arab countries had been closely associated with controlling the reins of power. One of the first acts of Gamal Abdel Nasser's ‘free officers’ after their 1952 coup in Egypt was to take control of state radio and deliver Communiqué Number 1, announcing the change of the country's leadership. The same routine was repeated by Nasser's imitators in Iraq, Libya and Yemen. Controlling a mouthpiece was essential to feeding the propaganda machine that turned these military coups into ‘revolutions’ that could not be criticized, let alone reversed.
Millions of people around the region tuned into Nasser's Voice of the Arabs radio station, which started broadcasting in 1953 and delivered a mix of the Egyptian leader's rousing pan-Arab and anti-imperialist rhetoric alongside music from legendary Arab singers like Egyptian diva Umm Kalthoum. Voice of the Arabs galvanized opposition to British-installed monarchs and Western policy but its allure faded after 1967 when, as Egypt lost Gaza, Syria lost the Golan Heights and Jordan lost the West Bank and East Jerusalem to Israel, its chief presenter, Ahmed Said, lied across the airwaves about impending Arab victory.7 The disappointment, when the truth began to seep through other channels in the following days, was made worse by the enormity of the untruth.
The station lost its credibility, and throughout the 1970s and 1980s Arabs viewed state television, radio and newspapers with a mixture of boredom and contempt. Syrians knew something interesting was going on when a Lebanese or French magazine would be turned back at the border, or when certain pages were torn out. In Arab countries where independent newspapers were allowed, journalists and editors had to perform linguistic acrobatics to get a controversial point across without breaching one of the many red lines that criss-crossed public life.
Regardless of what had happened in the region on a given day, state news bulletins would typically begin with a report on the president or monarch receiving a delegation of well-wishers or cutting a ribbon. The anniversaries of each country's ‘revolution’ would be marked by endless military parades and hours of empty speeches that were televised live. The first lady's visit to a charity or fundraising event would be duly covered alongside a flattering photo. Across the Arab world, state television fed the public on a stale diet of propaganda that appeared to belong to another era and was increasingly out of step, not just with modern technology, but with reality. Media output would be controlled by a ministry of information or its equivalent, often housed in an imposing Soviet-style block where censors combed through the newspapers and from where press accreditation and visas for foreign journalists could be both issued and withdrawn.
With the arrival of satellite television in the 1990s, people suddenly had a choice. Based in London, the Middle East Broadcasting Center (MBC) became the Arab world's first private free-to-air satellite channel when it launched in 1991.8 Offering a mix of popular Arabic entertainment shows with programmes that were already successful in the West, it was an instant hit among the millions of Arabic-speakers who lived in Europe. Overseas dissidents also began to set up their own television broadcasts from Europe. Rifaat al-Assad, the exiled brother of Syria's late president, ran the Arab News Network from London, which became a favoured base for Arab exiles and their broadcasts.9
Yet until the launch of Al-Jazeera in 1996, those who wanted to watch professional news broadcasts rather than entertainment and competing propaganda bulletins were still forced to turn to English- or French-language television. During the 1990–1 Gulf War, Arabic-speakers, like the rest of the world, watched events unfold on the US network CNN, and many felt the coverage to be one-sided.10 Those with a particular interest in current affairs tuned in to the BBC World Service or Radio Monte Carlo, which both ran Arabic radio broadcasts. Yet none of those services could hope for mass appeal. English and French television was only relevant to elites educated in foreign languages. Only journalists, intellectuals and dissidents, people with a direct interest, would go the extra mile to tune in to the international radio news they could not get in their own language.
Hailed as an Arabic CNN, Al-Jazeera was not only the first dedicated news channel in the Arabic language but also an antidote to the stale newscasts of old. Owned by the government of Qatar and considered by friend and foe to be a tool of the tiny emirate's increasingly muscular foreign policy, Al-Jazeera nevertheless transformed the region's media landscape.
The channel's approach to news, encapsulated by the tagline ‘Al-Rai … Wal Rai al-Akhar’, or ‘The Opinion … and the Other Opinion’, helped to create what Marc Lynch has called a ‘new Arab public’.11 For the first time, Arabs were able to watch commentators, activists and politicians offering conflicting points of view on the news rather than guests carefully selected to cheerlead for the government or, on opposition stations, parrot an incendiary opposition line. A more professional and nuanced approach to news was not all that Al-Jazeera, whose original staff were mainly graduates of a failed Arabic-language joint venture between Saudi-owned Orbit and the BBC, brought to Arab airwaves. Through its controversial political talk shows, the station had, over the years, played a significant role in eroding the cult of personality that Arab dictators had so carefully tried to construct among their domestic populations.
Similar to CNN's Crossfire, Al Itijah al-Mu'akis, or ‘The Opposite Direction’, was one programme that was accused of polarizing public opinion. Its host, Faisal al-Qasim, a Syrian Druze, chose a deliberately divisive theme each week and invited two people he knew would disagree strongly to debate it. The show often brought together pro- and anti-regime commentators speaking from European exile or in Al-Jazeera studios in Doha. Egged on by the provocative questions of the bespectacled Qasim, the show often collapsed into a shouting match and guests had been known to walk off. Qasim, who st
udied drama at Britain's Hull University, had received hate mail and death threats over his programme.12
In January 2011, with Tunisia's Ben Ali still in his presidential palace and protests yet to take off in Egypt, Qasim invited two journalists onto his show to discuss whether citizens should have the right to criticize their rulers. In an Al-Jazeera online poll, 86 per cent had answered yes. In his typically provocative introduction to the topic of discussion, Qasim asked: ‘Has it not become much easier to insult a prophet or even God himself than it is to insult an Arab ruler? Why do Arab rulers consider themselves holier than all that is holy? Why do criminals, thieves … and thugs get imprisoned for a few months in our countries before they are released, while anyone who insults an Arab ruler disappears behind the sun?’
He then compared the Arab world to the West: ‘Don't people pelt rulers in the West with tomatoes, rotten eggs and even shoes, without any punishment? Why does a ruler in the West accept all insults from his people, bearing in mind that he is democratically elected, whereas the Arab ruler does not accept any criticism, bearing in mind that he enjoys no legitimacy?‘13
Such a televised discussion would have been unthinkable in the Arab world in the 1970s or 1980s. A testimony to the taboos Al-Jazeera broke was the fact that it irritated just about everyone from Israel, to the United States, to other Arab rulers, who had at various times closed it down, banned its reporters, or even withdrawn their ambassadors from Qatar over the channel's coverage.14
When US-led forces invaded Afghanistan in 2001, Al-Jazeera was the only foreign television station with a correspondent based in the country. It beamed footage of the airstrikes and video messages from Osama bin Laden, enraging the US government of George W. Bush. Some US commentators labelled it ‘Jihad TV’ and campaigned to prevent cable networks from carrying Al-Jazeera English when that channel was launched in 2006. Coverage from Arabic-speaking reporters in Iraq and around the Arab world, rather than journalists embedded with US-led forces during the 2003 invasion, produced a far more negative perspective on the build-up to and the aftermath of the war. The station's decision to broadcast videos of hostages pleading for their lives led to accusations from senior US officials that it was encouraging the insurgency.15
Al-Jazeera also became the first Arab channel to seriously compete with the Israeli media's version of events. It had made its name in the region with wall-to-wall coverage of the second Palestinian intifada, which began in 2000 when then-Israeli opposition leader Ariel Sharon visited Jerusalem's Temple Mount, home to the Al-Aqsa mosque and a hotly-contested area that is sacred both to Muslims and Jews. But at the same time, Al-Jazeera shocked viewers when it became the first Arab TV channel to begin hosting Israeli officials and spokespeople, sticking by its promise to provide more than one point of view.
It was not only the variety of perspectives represented on Al-Jazeera that changed the media landscape in the Arab world, but also the fact that it engaged its viewers. Al-Jazeera organized shows where viewers could call in and air their political views live and uncensored, and many did. It became not just a station that informed its audience about the different points of view that were out there, but a station that engaged with them in a continuous, cross-border conversation. Whatever the Qatari emir's objectives in financing the project, and dozens of theories abound, there was something essentially democratizing about a channel that reflected the enormous diversity of Arab public opinion, and a channel that allowed people to have their say.
The new Arab media landscape was clearly much more interactive and democratic than had been the Voice of the Arabs at the height of pan-Arab nationalism. Listeners across the region had indeed tuned in to Nasser's rousing speeches, but that was a one-way conversation. It offered one voice and one ideology. It spoke for the Arab people, who were not invited to speak back. Now, and largely thanks to Al-Jazeera's pioneering role, they could.
While some Arab governments place theoretical restrictions on the ownership of satellite dishes, it is not a rule that any have seriously tried to enforce. A look at the Damascus skyline from the Qasyoun ridge reveals a sea of dishes across the city. Al-Jazeera flickered on television screens in the capital's cafés and hotels throughout the decade before the 2011 uprisings. Satellite dishes lurched, rusting and dusty, from every balcony of even the shabbiest apartment blocks and sat atop the breeze-block dwellings of the bleakest villages, built along motorways surrounded by sand. A 2010 opinion poll found that 85 per cent of Arabs relied on the television for their news, and a remarkable 78 per cent listed Al-Jazeera as either their first or second choice for international news.16
Shrinking the Arab World
Satellite TV and the internet played another role that would prove vital once the protests in Tunisia had begun. Over the previous two decades they had made the Arab world smaller, consolidating the sense of community among a group of people who shared the same language, and many of the same concerns, but lived in a vast area that stretched from the Atlantic Ocean off Morocco to the Indian Ocean off Oman.
Well into the 1990s, populations had been limited largely to the newspapers and channels available in their own country, subject to varying levels of censorship, self-censorship and legal restrictions. But pan-Arab news stations meant that a person sitting in Damascus could closely follow developments in Tunisia and Bahrain and gauge different perspectives on different channels. From 2003, it was not just Al-Jazeera that facilitated this consolidation. The Saudi-owned Al-Arabiya, launched just before the Iraq war as a counterweight to its Qatari rival, quickly took off. Its coverage was more conservative, but just as slick, and it offered some of the strongest coverage of business and stock markets in the Arab world, another sea change from the days when the state controlled the economy too.
Beyond the news bulletins, young people from all over the region watched and participated in shows such as Lebanon's Star Academy, a copy of a French concept that mixes elements of the British reality TV show Big Brother and the talent contest The X-Factor. The series was a sensation. Dozens of entertainment channels played endless selections of the latest Arabic music videos, which ranged from Lebanese sex symbol Haifa Wehbe frolicking in a wet dress, to Egyptian pop star Amr Diab in his jeans and styled black hair, to Kuwaiti crooners in traditional white robes singing in the desert. Lebanese multi-platinum star Nancy Ajram became the Arab face of Coca-Cola and Arab pop stars appeared in advertising campaigns around the region.
Alongside these symbols of popular culture, satellite television also played host to preachers from Sheikh Yousef al-Qaradawy, who appeared on Al-Jazeera's Al-Sharia wal-Hayat, or ‘Religion and Life’, to Amr Khaled, an Egyptian accountant turned superstar televangelist. With his dapper suits and neat moustache, Khaled proved popular among the young middle classes who may have been turned off by the dour sermons of the traditional bearded clerics. Khaled's television show attracted more viewers than Oprah Winfrey before the uprising, and he has two million fans on Facebook.17 During the month of Ramadan, when Muslims fast from dawn to dusk, television viewing shoots up in the prime-time evening slot that follows the iftar, or breaking of the fast. Egyptian- and Syrian-made soaps and dramas exploring themes from the complications of polygamy to forbidden love have enthralled sated viewers across the Middle East and North Africa. The Syrian-made soap opera Bab al-Hara, or ‘The Neighbourhood Gate’, a historical drama set in a quarter of the old city of Damascus in the interwar period, was an instant hit, returning season after season.
This plethora of regional news, regional music, regional soap operas and regional game shows, however trivial some of them might have been, helped to bolster the feeling of ‘Arabness’ and the sense that what happened in the Palestinian territories or Iraq or Morocco mattered to all. In the decade before the Arab Spring, satellite television had made it easier than ever before for Arabs to coalesce around a cause of importance to the whole community. Al-Jazeera's coverage of the second Palestinian intifada electrified audiences and helped spur p
rotests that erupted in Beirut, Cairo and Tunis. Those protests not only expressed sympathy for the Palestinians but expressed anger at rulers from Mubarak in Egypt to King Abdullah in Saudi Arabia for their reluctance to help or to complain to their US allies.18 The anger was palpable on the streets. In Cairo, protesters congregated around the Israeli embassy, in Syria they attacked the US embassy and, in the Palestinian refugees camps of Lebanon, demonstrators burned effigies of Ariel Sharon and torched the Israel and US flags.19
It was a reaction that would be repeated with the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the war between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2006 and the Gaza War of 2008–9. Expatriates around the world could communicate through television, share experiences and spread a sense of community that at once unified them and reflected the diversity of their concerns and opinions. Available internationally, satellite television also helped to connect the thoughts and interests of a huge Arab diaspora with those of their compatriots back home.
By the time the uprisings of 2011 came around, the wooden sounds of state TV had long been exposed for what they were. Criticism of leaders was already on people's minds, and from there it quickly tumbled onto their lips. Many were already thinking beyond borders. Al-Jazeera's initial coverage of the protests in Tunisia, when Western media had hardly registered that something deeply troubling was taking place, was unparalleled, and appreciated by Tunisians.
Al-Jazeera's coverage of the Arab Spring, like its previous programming, would attract much criticism. Tunisians might have thanked the channel for paying attention to their protests, but in the aftermath of the revolution many Tunisian secularists would accuse it of giving more airtime and therefore more credence to their Islamist political rivals. As the biggest advertising market in the Middle East and North Africa and home of both Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya, protests in the Gulf would later emerge as a taboo subject for the majority of Arab satellite channels, even those that might otherwise be committed to independent news coverage.
