Arab Media & Society

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This article examines Deutsche Welle’s Arabic television programming to evaluate its goal of promoting intercultural dialogue.  Framed around the concept of media-promoted intercultural dialogue, the paper presents the results of a comparative content analysis of Deutsche Welle and two pan-Arab satellite channels, al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya.  Taking the results as a starting point, I propose suggestions for how to improve the performance of government-sponsored international broadcasting to overcome cultural divides. 

Functions of international broadcasting

Starting in the 1930s and increasing with the beginning of the Cold War, several countries began complementing traditional diplomacy by setting up so-called “public diplomacy” programs. Hans N. Tuch, a diplomat in a leading position at the U.S. Information Agency until 1985 and former director of the Voice of America, defined public diplomacy as “a government’s process of communicating with foreign publics in an attempt to bring about understanding for its nation’s ideas and ideals, its institutions and culture, as well as its national goals and current policies.”[1]

To promote these ideas, values and policies, cultural institutions such as the Goethe Institute or the British Council were founded. Furthermore, academic exchange services like the German DAAD or the American Fulbright Commission were established to give foreign elites an understanding of the other nation’s goals and culture. While these instruments focus on small but important target groups, mass media reach the broader public. Subsequently, many Western states founded specific channels to attract foreign publics. France started Radio France International in 1931 and the British launched the BBC World Service in the following year. The U.S. followed with Voice of America in 1942, later adding special regional stations like Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia or Radio Martí targeting Cuba. The German Deutsche Welle was established in 1953. In addition to Western channels, socialist countries or regional powers also started to broadcast internationally, such as Egypt with Nasser’s Voice of the Arabs. In the 1980s, international broadcasting entered the television sector, including, for example, French TV5 or the British BBC World.

While international broadcasting became a mainstay of many nations’ public diplomacy efforts, the states running these channels attribute differing functions to them. In a comparative analysis of the international broadcasting of five nations[2] Groebel identified six possible functions.[3] Two main functions of most Western channels are 1) the focus on being a gateway for accurate information in crises and 2) compensation for the lack of media supply in underdeveloped regions. On the other hand, France and Germany particularly focus on the function of 3) representing a certain culture and language as well as on 4) offering a connection to the home country for fellow countrymen abroad. Groebel characterizes the U.S. approach as being 5) “missionary” in that it has “the goal of disseminating certain social and political convictions, concepts and ideologies.”[4] The British BBC, however, is seen as a 6) global player that tries to encompass all but the missionary function in addition to being a global news channel.

Until the 1990s, the intervening, compensatory and missionary approaches might have been legitimated by the presence of authoritarian media systems in Eastern Europe, Asia, and the Arab world. However, due to the enhancement of the media infrastructure and the rapid global expansion of information technology, the issue of inadequate access to information has diminished. The Arab World in particular has become the opposite of a closed-off region. The monitoring organization Arab Advisors Group[5] counted 370 free-to-air satellite TV-channels.  56 of these broadcast privately-produced programming while 38 air state-produced content.   In addition, there are several news channels, entertainment channels as well as other special-interest programs.

Given this proliferation of options, it is necessary to ask if government-sponsored international broadcasting in the Arab World has been made outdated by globalization and digitalization. While Marc Lynch predicts that most of these channels “are most likely to simply disappear into the ocean of other broadcasters,”[6] Kai Hafez disagrees, arguing that government-sponsored international broadcasting has great potential in a world shaped by migration and transnational events because of its original construction as a system-interdependent medium.[7] According to Hafez, an international channel targeting certain regions “is dependent for its own survival not only on the financial support of the home government, but also on finding acceptance on foreign markets.”[8]

Thus, this potential will only be realized if the functions of international broadcasting reflect the present situation of regional media systems. Simply providing access to information is not a sufficient main goal; rather, such broadcasting should aim to foster analysis and interpretation of this information against the background of specific cultural and political understandings. This can be termed the “dialogue function.”

The common definition of dialogue refers to the exchange of information and views between two actors or representatives of two groups.[9] Thus, the implicit aim of a dialogue is to broaden one’s horizon and to understand the other and the rationale behind his actions. For mass media like radio and television, engaging in such a dialogue seems difficult because the flow of information is generally directed one-way. Picking up this point, Oliver Zöllner argues that in a dialogue-oriented model of broadcasting the public should not be seen as a target audience only, but should be made “partners in the meaning-making process.”[10] Zöllner, in referring to Habermas’ theory of communicative action, proposes a communication model of “negotiated understanding.”[11] Hafez elaborates on this proposition, adding that for a dialogue between two cultures on the media level, “the broadcasting countries’ interest in presenting themselves in a particular way” has to be balanced sensibly “with the target countries’ interest in information.“[12]

Following from these theoretical assumptions, the international broadcasters in the Arab world must consider the agenda set by relevant regional media to remain attractive to local audiences. Since the rise of new media in the Arab world, al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya have become regional opinion leaders for Arab audiences. Therefore, news programs targeted at the Arab region can only be successful if their agenda and their regional reference is positioned and adjusted to that of the market-leading al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya networks. Thus, DWTV has partly to follow the agenda of both pan-Arab news channels, in particular with their regional reference and topics of mutual interest to both cultures.

On the other hand, international broadcasting aims to introduce topics and views from the home country to broaden a foreign public’s agenda and to stimulate new perspectives. However, to reach this goal, the existing agenda must be complemented by topics that relate to regional interests and cultural concepts.

Deutsche Welle and its competitors

In a 2005 revision of its mission statement, Deutsche Welle explicitly positions the dialogue function as a main aim:

Deutsche Welle was commissioned to convey ‘German and other positions on important issues, chiefly from politics, the arts and economics" to people abroad "as well as to provide a forum in Europe and other continents aimed at promoting understanding and dialog between cultures and peoples.’ Promoting the German language is another part of the DW mission.[13]

To fulfill this mission, Deutsche Welle broadcasts radio programming and produces online content in 30 languages as well as a 24-hour TV-program in German and English supplemented with regional programming windows in Arabic and Spanish. Measuring audience size is difficult. Optimistic self-evaluations assume 65 million listeners, 28 million viewers per week[14] and 5 million online users per month.[15] DWTV seems to be particularly popular in Latin America, reaching 3.5 percent of the respective national audiences.[16]

Deutsche Welle is a public station within the German ARD national television network. However, it is subsidized by the Ministry of Culture, rather than financed by obligatory license fees. Until 2010, Deutsche Welle operates on an annual budget of €271 m, which at the same time means an annual decrease of almost five percent since 1998.[17] This contrasts with the policies of the United Kingdom and the U.S., which have increased their international broadcasting budgets considerably in the last two years.[18] In light of this disparity, Manfred Kops from the Institute of Broadcasting Economics at the University of Cologne concludes that “the increase of the importance of international and intercultural communication is not reflected in the budget Germany provides for its international broadcasting.”[19] While not on par with the British or American broadcasting budgets, Deutsche Welle has boosted broadcasting efforts to the Arab world following September 11 and the invasion of Iraq. 

With Radio Sawa and al-Hurra TV the U.S. launched two Arabic broadcasters in 2002 and 2004 that are funded with €54 m annually.[20] In 2005, Russia started an Arabic 24/7-news-channel Russia Today followed in 2006 by France with an Arabic version of France 24. The BBC followed in 2008 with its long-awaited Arabic TV network that supposedly works on an annual budget of about €30 m.[21]