Arab Spring

October 24, 2011 World Screen

The protests taking place across the Middle East are bringing dramatic changes to the broadcasting landscape.

For years any rebellious coup d’état would simply target the presidential palace, followed quickly by the local radio station. Control of those two gave any revolutionary a much better chance of success. Today’s Arab Spring series of Middle East uprisings have taken those traditional targets one step further: now they target the satellite TV stations, and throughout the Arab world this latest fresh taste of democracy has resulted in some dramatic changes to the broadcasting landscape.
 
Almost without exception, viewers have turned away from their state-backed news outlets and instead turned to independent news sources. Al Jazeera out of Qatar and MBC’s Al Arabiya have done exceptionally well, as have trusted non-Arab broadcasters such as BBC World and CNN International.
 
SPRING AWAKENINGS
The series of popular revolutions started on December 17, 2010, in Tunisia. The president was toppled. The uprising spread to Algeria by December 28, Lebanon by January 12, 2011, and Jordan by January 14. Mauritania followed on January 17, along with Sudan and Oman on the same day. Morocco saw street protests on January 30. Saudi Arabia experienced unheard of street demonstrations on January 21. By January 25, the street demonstrations in the Middle East’s cultural and political heartland of Egypt were measured in the hundreds of thousands. Eighteen days later, President Hosni Mubarak resigned. Yemen was in full civil war by February 3, and Iraq saw major street demonstrations start on February 10, followed by Bahrain on February 14. Libya’s protesters rose on February 15. Kuwait saw its first protests on February 18. Syria’s protesters were kept in check until March 15, when civilians attacked public buildings.
 
Foreign journalists got well-merited credit for helping to foment and publicize popular uprisings against the region’s despots. Satellite TV stations, Al Jazeera in particular, struck at the very roots of power in many Arab states by making official censorship irrelevant and by competing very successfully against government propaganda.
 
The backlash against government authority was most public in Egypt and saw the arrest in February of President Hosni Mubarak. The transformation at the giant Nile-side Egyptian Radio and Television Union (ERTU) building was almost instantaneous. Within hours of Mubarak stepping down, Egypt’s state-supported television began congratulating the Egyptian people “for their pure great revolution, led by the best of the Egyptian youth.” The next day, Egypt’s MENA state news agency issued a statement assuring the people that “Egyptian TV will be honest in carrying its message” and since it “is owned by the people of Egypt [it] will be in their service.”
 
A few days later the arrests started. “Corruption, nepotism, favoritism and a waste of public money are pervasive inside [the Nile-side TV building]. You can see signs of them everywhere,” said Shahira Amin, a well-known Nile TV news anchor who quit in early February in protest at what was being done by government forces. “The whole system should be changed,” she argued.
 
A former Egyptian Minister of Information, Anas al-Fiqi, was arrested on February 23 on charges of corruption. A few hours later, Osama el-Sheikh, ERTU’s chairman, was arrested. Both were imprisoned pending trials. Egypt’s attorney general has frozen the assets of both men, and forbidden them to leave the country.
 
The Arab Spring, at least as far as Egypt’s broadcasting freedoms are concerned, has resulted in even greater demand for satellite capacity, says Salah Hamza, chief technology officer at NileSat, which operates satellites beaming 600-plus channels across North Africa and the Middle East. “The new freedoms we are seeing in the Middle East are leading to fresh demand,” says Hamza. “Would-be broadcasters want to be on our neighborhood. This itself could lead to a major flowering of creativity. In general, the national stations have fallen well behind the private [non-government] channels. Egypt’s new Prime Minister [Essam Sharaf] seemed to recognize this when he first visited the private TV channels prior to visiting Egypt’s public channels. He feels that if he wants to talk to people he has to address the private channels, where the mass-market viewers are.”
 
THE FLOODGATES OPEN
On April 17, Egypt’s General Authority for Investment and Free Zones (GAFI)—which overseas the Egyptian Media Production City (EMPC) and the NileSat transmission facility—said that the country’s new, more relaxed regulations were designed to attract fresh investment in the media sector. Under the new legislation, broadcasters will no longer have to obtain the approval of Egypt’s security services. The first flood of applicants saw 16 new channels approved by the end of April. Osama Saleh, GAFI’s chairman, announced that security will no longer make inquiries into Egyptians who wish to establish satellite channels, and that channels will be granted licenses to present general entertainment rather than specialized content.
 
While this is creating fresh opportunities for NileSat, there are also problems. “What is really bothering us today is signal jamming in our region,” Hamza says. “The problem itself is not new, but what is now different is the intensity of the jamming.”
 
JAMM SESSION
One major broadcaster hit by signal jamming in March was Dubai-based MBC and its Al Arabiya all-news channel. The jamming, said experts, came from somewhere south of the Libyan capital of Tripoli. Al Jazeera also suffered badly at the hands of thugs. One of its journalists was murdered on March 12 while filming in Libya. Wadah Khanfar, director general of Al Jazeera Network, said at the time: “To those who are trying to muzzle Al Jazeera through criminal acts, killing its correspondents and those working for it, blocking its signal, or jamming its signal, I would like to tell them that no one can hide the truth. We live in times where the truth is defended by soldiers who believe in a true message, and we will continue to deliver our message no matter what the cost.”
 
NileSat’s Hamza says his team could do very little. “They were jamming several transponders at the same time, affecting Al Jazeera, Alhurra, Al Arabiya and others, all news channels. The broadcasters involved were being moved to spare frequencies on our satellites but the jamming was at very high power levels. We were left with very little that we could do, even reducing the actual power of the satellite was not having much effect. Then there was jamming of the Libyan main channel by the Libyan opposition. So we had jamming from government supporters and anti-government supporters in Libya.”
 
These problems aside, Hamza is optimistic: “Today, we have more clients than ever. We now have a long list of private individuals and organizations who want to broadcast TV channels on NileSat, and now have the freedom to do so.
 
There’s another change. A few months back, under the old regime, we were obliged to remove certain channels. They are now all back on air with us, and can I say the new processes are a little more relaxed than under the old regime.”
 
Hamza is right. The Arab League, on May 15, formally asked Arabsat and NileSat to cease transmissions of Libya’s Jamahiriya Satellite Channel and “any other channel” that might be sympathetic to the Libyan government. The decision was taken at the end of a special meeting in Cairo on the same day. However, the request placed the satellite operators in something of a dilemma: they held valid long-term contracts with the Libyans. It took almost a month for the Libyan state-backed channels to be switched off.
 
AN UNCERTAIN FUTURE
The Egyptian Arab Spring is far from over. There was an election promised for some time in October, and despite these new freedoms, some are anxious that the opportunities for critical voices might dry up following an election.
 
There are other risks. “Raising the ceiling of free expression in the wake of the revolution has lured the mass media in general to pick up thrilling stories and offer sensational material that drifts from the basic target of the media service in favor of commercial [interests],” says Cairo-based media expert Yasser Abdel-Aziz, adding that lifting the lid off a once tightly-controlled media has generated a fervent tendency in the opposite direction.
 
The new freedoms are encouraging heavyweight players to directly enter the TV market. Fast-growing Middle East broadcasting group Rotana, in which Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation is a significant shareholder, launched a general-entertainment channel specifically for the giant Egyptian market. Rotana is backed by Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal. The decision is a direct attack on Egypt’s state-backed ERTU cluster of channels. Moreover, the channel features Dr. Hala Sarhan, the president of Rotana Studios and an extremely popular face on Egyptian television.
 
Fahad Alsukait, the CEO of the Rotana Group, said the new channel confirms the company’s strong commitment to Egyptian viewers and is part of the company’s broader plans to increase its presence in the country. He added: “We continue to believe in the strong market growth Egypt will enjoy medium to long term and our investment in the new channel expresses such confidence and fits with the business plan of the group.”
 
There are plenty of other new channels in the region. Getting a firm hand on how many have launched since the start of the Arab Spring is difficult. Some feeling for the rate of progress can be seen in Arab Advisors Group’s (AAG) latest report. The number of free-to-air satellite TV channels in the Arab world available on Arabsat, NileSat and NOORSAT increased by 10.5 percent between April 2010 and April 2011, reaching 538 (excluding those in test transmission phase, 501 are fully operational, up from 448). AAG research revealed that private-sector general-entertainment channels dominate, accounting for about 20 percent of the total number of free-to-air networks in operation, followed by government-sector general channels.
 
TUNING IN
Analysts at Omnicom Media say TV viewing during the Arab Spring expanded dramatically. In the first quarter of this year daily TV consumption rose to six hours in Saudi Arabia and to five hours in the United Arab Emirates, as viewers across the region looked to stay up to date on the latest developments in other parts of the Arab world. The news channels, in particular, reported viewership gains, with audiences flocking to Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya. Omnicom indicates that the two channels almost doubled their viewing figures in February. Meanwhile, global satellite services like BBC World and CNN International experienced a 78-percent gain in audience numbers in Q1, as Western expats in the region also sought out regular updates on the turmoil.
 
Advertising revenue in the Arab world is also starting to recover after a staggering regional loss of US$100 million in February alone, when marketers apparently got cold feet in case the companies they represented were accused of political bias during times of tumult. Regional media expenditure has, reports Omnicon, been rising since March.
 
Indeed, while the political outcome of the Arab Spring is far from certain, the broadcasting outcome seems extremely healthy. There are new channels, and new freedoms of expression on existing channels. There will, inevitably, be teething problems in these new found freedoms, but hopefully over time the violent swings of the recent broadcasting pendulum will settle at mid-point.