The Media in Arab Countries: From Development Theories to Cooperation Policies

By Tourya Guaaybess

In early research work on international communication, the countries of North Africa and the Middle East were seen as part of the “Third World”, and the media had to be at the service of development. However, this situation is changing due to the transnationalization and liberalization of the media. Indeed, since the 1990s, the entry of the South – and Arab countries in this case – into the “information society” has become the dominant creed, although the vision is still globalizing and marked by stereotypes.

Representations of these societies are closely associated with international relations and geopolitics, characterized by tensions and conflicts. However, a force has come to disrupt the traditional rules of the game: Arab audiences. Digital media, the dissemination of which has been enabled by the implementation of the “information society”, empowers them to participate fully in a media confluence. This liberation from the discourse has two major consequences: the media and journalism sector has become more strategic than ever, and action toward development must be reinvented.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Jan 23, 2019
• ISBN: 9781119579793

Book preview

Foreword

Media researchers who only read English miss out on a lot that is available in their field in French. I discovered in the mid-1990s, when first seeking literature on Egyptian and pan-Arab media, that some of the most insightful – and sometimes the only – up-to-date data and analysis were to be found in French sources.

Tourya Guaaybess is a pioneering French scholar who has successfully crossed language barriers and disciplinary boundaries with work in both English and French. She was already doing fieldwork on Egyptian media when we first met in Cairo in 1999 and, having maintained her cutting-edge knowledge of that specialist area in the 20 years since then, brings depth as well as breadth to her research. That vantage point now informs this timely new book addressing questions about development models envisaged for Arab media by outsiders: academics, journalists and agencies providing development assistance.

The book consequently has the advantage of drawing on both French and English perspectives on development in general and media development in particular. It refers, among others, to one of the most trenchant commentators on the very concept of development, the French author Gilbert Rist. And it does so at a moment when former orthodoxies about media and development, once espoused by Western donors of overseas aid, are now the subject of deep scepticism and doubt. For one thing, with authoritarian government spreading in the Global North as well as the South, and private media increasingly subject to control by vested interests in a process that regulators and public representatives seem unable to curb, old certainties about one-way ‘transitions’ from authoritarian rule to democracy have collapsed.

Meanwhile, despite the existence today of so many online spaces for expression, Western observers still find it difficult to gauge public opinion in Arab countries, where political and cultural expression is tightly constrained. As the book argues, the problem with the notion of the ‘Arab street’, for all its apparently orientalist reductionism, lies not so much in the term itself as in the preconceptions of those who use it. Is there a suspicion, given the proliferation between 2002 and 2010 of so many new Arabic-language channels funded by non-Arab players, from the US, France and Germany to Russia, China and Turkey, that these players are basically more interested in speaking to Arab publics than listening to them? Are the changing paradigms of development aid and public diplomacy through the media leading to changes in the number and effectiveness of media interventions? If so, more or less effective for whom? These pages offer an unusually thoughtful and measured analysis of how diplomatic traditions, geopolitics and multifaceted media development objectives intersect.

Naomi SAKR

Doonan

November 2018

Introduction

The Extent, Decadence and Surge of Development Aid through the Media

Theories on development and development aid are, in principle, dependent on their fields of application and/or observation. They concern a specific field (health, land, food, etc.) and a specific geographical area. Our subject is the matter of development applied to the media and within the framework of Arab countries. These theories and scholarly recommendations have a history, and their examination is instructive in more than one way¹.

The construction of reality takes place in and through the relationships we maintain with one another: our descriptions, the applications of our conceptions of the world take shape within communication, and by the same token language. Attached to this position, social constructionism proposes a very rich conceptual range and opens to particularly productive practices while grasping the role of the media differently. It is a conception based on the principle that values, beliefs, institutions, customs, labels, laws, etc. are constructed by the members of a culture, through their interaction from generation to generation and from day to day. Thus, this approach conceives the world experience no longer in terms of systems but rather in terms of communicational exchanges and, therefore, mainly in terms of communicational content and stories. It is from this perspective that our work on Arab media as perceived in the countries of the Global North is situated: by both researchers and development aid agencies in Western countries.

We will see throughout this work that we have specific perceptions or constructions of realities: of development by the media in the countries of the Global South, of development by the media in Arab countries, of public opinion in Arab countries and the means to reach these audiences and to intervene in the media sector of these countries. Emphasis will be placed on the journalistic sector, which, in the wake of the Arab revolutions, is one of the preferred fields of intervention of development and cooperation agencies.

One of the main aspects of our conception of knowledge is that it emphasizes the essentially collective nature of scientific research. Every hypothesis, every knowledge and every scientific theory emerges within what Fleck calls a style of thinking. This style of thinking corresponds to the set of norms, principles, concepts and values specific to all knowledge and beliefs. It can therefore be compared to what is called a style in art or architecture, which corresponds, in the same way, to all the rules and values of a given era. This notion of thought style is inseparable from that of collective thought, which, according to Fleck, is at the origin of the norms of thought specific to the style of thought.

It is a closed and hierarchical system that takes the form of the scientific community, but which includes more broadly the whole hierarchical structure of a society. In Fleck’s thinking, there is the idea that each single piece of knowledge must be related not only to the body of knowledge specific to a given epoch but also to the set of institutions and practices specific to that epoch. From this point of view, to say that science is part of a collective thought process is to say that science is what we could call a total social fact (Mauss 1925). To say that Western democracies’ conceptions of development are part of a common framework of thought is to say that they obey a common ideology, in this case a liberal ideology.

These concepts are particularly illustrated through examples drawn from development theories and particularly when applied to the role of the media in Arab societies. These theories prove to be collective constructions, which are not facts but fictional entities and products of time.

These theories applied to Arab countries attract us in two ways: (1) because they have given rise to policies that have varied over time and are also observable in other regions of the South and (2) because they say a lot about the observer. Perhaps they say more about the researcher and their ideological position than about their subject. They are only aware of this position a posteriori by the outcome or result of their work.

It is therefore the media links and the South from a Northern perspective that is the subject of critical analysis here. We have chosen to circumscribe it to Arab countries and to make this examination through three lenses: that of academic work, that of media representations and finally through development acts in the media sector. The work, the media framing and the policies implemented convey representations that evolve, as we will see, according to the international context.

The villager, the government, the Arab street and the young blogger

We will see here that any work belies individual and societal perceptions, in this case of Middle East and North African societies. Different actors or archetypal figures of these societies have dominated it over the periods, and we have isolated and clarified some of them in the scientific literature in social sciences. These figures find an echo in the collective and media imagination of the societies of the researchers themselves.

Thus, in the 1960s, a figure seems to have emerged: that of the Bedouin or the villager; it was a question of getting out of the underdevelopment of the so-called traditional, rural societies. Indeed, in the 1960s, after independence, the priority was to modernize the most remote areas. This image and this concern of the poor in their village on the part of the researcher – and for the use of the developmental practitioner – will last for a while. It will not resist the transformation of societies under the effect of rural exodus, and since the late 1980s, economic liberalization has been promoted by international institutions such as the IMF or the World Bank. Arab regimes, continuously authoritarian in the 1990s², were seen as the doers of what were considered democratization processes or transitions; towards what, is to some extent unclear. The science of democratic transition or transitology has since been strongly challenged (see Dobry 2000, p. 585; Thiriot 2013; and also Dufy and Thiriot 2013). The shape of the government, whether capitalist, liberal, or a rentier State, has raised expectations, as evidenced by work on its role under the effects of globalization in particular. These expectations were fueled by a concern for Arab civil societies or, on the contrary, by the fear of an explosion of the Arab street. This remarkable expression proves to be what one could translate by Arab public opinion; it emerged after the Gulf War and flourished after September 11, 2001. In this decade, Arab countries were seen more as hearts to be convinced than as countries that had to be brought out of underdevelopment. Hence, there was a competition between various international powers to deploy a media arsenal towards this audience, this street, perceived (or seen, or considered, etc.) as a indistinct and indocible crowd.

Then, in fact, the seizure of material and symbolic resources, in other words, power, by the Arab ruling elites was brutally and without warning called into question by their fellow citizens at the time of the uprisings that began in Tunisia and gained the support of other Arab countries in 2011. And the Arab revolutions put an end, for a time, to the image of passive societies, to all-powerful states and to an Arab street without faces and without joy. At that time, in the eyes of the researcher and the Western journalist, there was no longer any question of a central government or followers societies. Arab countries were suddenly represented by connected young activists. The blogger and the cyber-journalist illustrated a contemporary and post-revolutionary civil society.

Obviously, these figures are simplifications, the enlarged lines fortunately do not mask visions and works more faithful to more subtle realities and the multitude of individualities, as much on the side of the observers as that of the observed. The treatment of these different types of actors must be considered as analytical angles. It also announces the outlines (or plan) of this work that highlight these different assessments of the countries of intervention by researchers, agencies and diplomacy when it comes to the media and Arab countries. Finally, these archetypal identities are all milestones in a retrospective of the understanding of the role of the media in Arab countries.

It should be noted that the primary development theories of the researchers in Western democracies, which are intended to apply to the media of the South, continue to permeate policies of action. Thus, a review of this genealogy over the decades would be most instructive. Such a retrospective, by sticking to this theme, seems easy to implement. It seems only because it is in fact blurred by relations with those countries that are not established under the exclusive yardstick of the developmentalism of the first hours and of such a clear relationship between the powers of the North and the developing countries. Bertrand Badie is right to recall that the simple power relations of the Cold War era are over and that the great powers today have everything to fear from the countries formerly under their yoke (Badie 2013). It is these bifurcations and these changing and contradictory policies and actions according to varied international issues and events that we will try to resolve.

The questions to which we will bring elements of answers are many. To what extent does the evolution of international relations permeate the theories and practices of international development actors? Is there still talk of development thanks to the media today, and how? What determines the perception of fields of action by researchers in the social sciences and information and communication studies? What are the cooperation policies implemented in the media by Western countries today? Cooperation policies are said to be increasingly inclusive, i.e. with the active participation of civil societies or bottom-up policies. However, don’t they remain primarily institutional and governmental and do they fit within the framework of bilateral relations or inter-governmental organizations? These questions concern both the positioning of research and the application of these theories, in other words, the implementation of policies towards media spaces in Arab countries. Finally, as we can see, the link between research and practice is also questioned.

Outline of this book

This book is the result of several years of research and reflection. In the first chapter, we will return to reference works on Arab media to determine the level of understanding of this subject in academic research. This review of literature, which is necessarily targeted and selective, aims to show the growing interest in a subject that has been rarely addressed until recently. Today, the multiplication of projects, scientific meetings and works on this object with ever-finer specializations testifies to the importance of this subject of study, which has become both ordinary and essential to understand societies and their most diverse facets.

We then return to the origins, so to speak, and put into context the works that more specifically deal with the media and development theme. In this case, the academic literature review does not cover all the studies that have been carried out on the media in Arab countries; indeed, it is also within international bodies such as the United Nations that one will find reference works on these questions. Then, in the early 2000s, with the advent of the so-called information society and the widespread use of digital media, many normative studies on the role of the media in the countries of the South emanated from the International Telecommunication Union. The passage from relay to relay is enlightening: ITU is becoming the privileged forum for reflection on the conditions for access by the countries of the South to the information society, just as UNESCO was the forum for debates on the international flow of information. The emphasis is on pipelines and on access to the greatest number of digital tools, and not on the debates about the global imbalance in terms of means of information that had made UNESCO’s contribution to the field of communication.

We will understand, in support of the rich literature produced by ITU at the time of the World Information Summit, that digital convergence is reconfiguring a vision of development through the media to the extent that the telecommunications and audiovisual sectors are heavily dependent on private investors, in addition to the usual public sector actors. ITU’s liberal and highly economic approach corresponds to an assumed paradigm shift in international institutions. However, it seemed useful to us to draw on the most recent ITU resources and indicators, among other institutions, to measure the relative place of Arab countries in the global information society and to have in mind precise sociodemographic data on audiences and their use of digital media in various Arab countries.

In order to remain with the public in Arab countries and to reveal the representations we can have of them, we have chosen a different field of investigation: the French, English and American written press and what these national information newspapers say about public opinion in Arab countries or, more precisely, about the Arab street from the genesis of this expression to 2016. This critical analysis of the content of the press will show us that the preconceptions were swept away at the time of the Arab spring.

Beyond fantasies, and if we stick to the facts, governments and/or businesses in Arab countries participate in the liberalization of the media as advocated by international bodies. Consequently, sympathetic global conversations about developmental aid simply perpetuate a vision of powerful Western states versus weak Southern states (Badie 2013). We will observe this through media geopolitics: the challenge for countries wishing to mark their presence in Arab countries is to extend their area of influence. This is done through their media, as well as through cooperation policies in the media sector.

This book is the result of many years of documentation and surveys among journalists, trainers, cooperation agency managers and bloggers. We have collected our data over the years³ and, more recently, for the production of this book. In addition to the many remote contacts – in Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria and Egypt – and meetings in Paris and even in England in 2015, we conducted a survey in November 2016 in Cairo. It turns out that the sector that attracts attention is journalism, especially after the revolutions in Arab countries. As elsewhere in the world, a new form of journalism is emerging in young and connected societies. As Stephen Reese, an American professor of journalism at the University of Texas at Austin School of Journalism, put it:

Journalism, as a practice and interpretive community, is adapting to this emerging global news arena and increasingly must navigate between its traditional ‘vertical’ orientation within whatever nation state it is carried out and a ‘horizontal’ perspective that transcends national frameworks (Reese 2008, p. 241).

Developmental agencies are aware of this and are taking advantage of this second trend. New ways of thinking about the South are emerging through their actions in Arab countries and the work of