The US presidential election of 2004 attracted an unprecedented amount of international media attention, perhaps nowhere more so than in the Arab world, where the impact of American policy has made itself acutely felt in the three years since September 11. Concerns over the war in Iraq, combined with frustration …

Zafar Siddiqi, CEO of CNBC's Arab-world franchise CNBC Arabiya, has announced the impending launch of CNBC Pakistan, with headquarters in Karachi. With a team working currently out of Dubai and another in Pakistan, the new channel is in the last stage of negotiations for its license and the senior team …

This paper was presented at the Broadcast Education Association's annual convention in April 2004, where the author participated in a panel organized by the association's International Division. The dark desert night is alight with streaks of blue and red streaming across the sky. A mosque is the symbol-laden backdrop for …

This paper was presented at a conference organized by The Centre of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at the University of Cambridge on "Arab Satellite Broadcasting in the Age of Globalization" held 1-3 November 2002 and is reproduced with the permission of The Cambridge Arab Media Project. This version has …

I. INTRODUCTION The Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) held its ninth conference in Doha, the Qatari capital, during November 2001. Members decided to establish an Islamic English-language satellite television channel. The main aim of such an initiative is apparently to educate the West about "real Islam," in light of …

Reprinted from Al Hayat, 7 November, 2004, p.21, with permission. This year's Ramadan brings in its train, as usual, hundreds of serialized dramas, talk shows, and other standard format programs of the sort that increase year after year as a result of the burgeoning number of Arab satellite channels. What is …

In a fast-changing world, easy observations remain in consciousness long after they have become invalid. So it is with the conceit that Al Jazeera put Qatar on the map and not visa versa, or the variant that Al Jazeera is more important as a regional power than the State of …

Hamza Yusuf Hanson was born in Walla Walla, Washington, and raised in northern California. He became Muslim in 1977 in Santa Barbara, California and subsequently moved to the Middle East and studied Arabic and Islam for four years in the United Arab Emirates and later in Medina, Algeria, Morocco, and …

The US government has devised a plan to repair its image in the Arab World. This plan includes generously-funded, government-sponsored international broadcasting, known in the past as Voice of America or Radio Free Europe. Today, under the guidance of the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), two new programs have been …

From the 1890s until the 1950s, the inventors of television thought of it as a means for disseminating information in a fashion similar to print, radio, and film. By the early '60s, media use and consumption emerged as a cultural concern in the debates on the "consumer society." The '70s …