Arab Media & Society The Arab Media Hub For more than twenty years-since the beginning of the Lebanese Civil War in 1976-London has served as the unparalleled centre of Arabic-language media. This study, drawn from ethnographic fieldwork conducted in London's Arab media institutions, challenges two contentions emerging from recent academic literature on transnationalism and new media technologies. Firstly, …
Read More »News World – The Next Generation
Ever since 1995, the News World conference has been bringing together the most important editors, reporters, and manufacturers in the international broadcast news industry. Its purpose was simple, and growing in importance every year - to debate the impact advancing technology was having on the quality of their journalism, to …
Read More »New Media Realities in the Middle East: reporting from a conflict where language is a weapon, “a camera is as dangerous as a gun”, and journalists are targets
The following is the transcript of a panel discussion that took place at The NewsXchange in Ljubljana, Slovenia, 10-11 November, 2002. Participating were Nik Gowing of the BBC, Eason Jordan, president of CNN, Shalom Kital, CEO and editor-in-chief of Channel 2 News, Israel, Jonathan Baker, foreign editor of BBC news, …
Read More »New Moves for Showtime
Showtime-one of the Arab world's main Pay TV packagers of English-language Western entertainment for an overwhelmingly Arab audience-has staked a claim in recent months to be regarded as the premium network for Arabic movies with the introduction of its own Arabic movie channel-Al Shasha. Much of Showtime's Arab cinema content …
Read More »Could SATMODE Be Satellite’s “Killer Application?”
SES Global has plans afoot to dramatically improve how viewers talk back to broadcasters. They are working on 'SatMode', an 'always on' two-way return path that send messages directly from the set-top box up to the satellite, and onto the broadcaster. The intention is to develop an ultra-low cost two-way …
Read More »What The World’s Poor Watch On TV
Is television an outpost of cultural imperialism? More than two billion people in poor countries now have access to a set. But, rather than envying the West, they are increasingly tuning in to local programs. In 1999, an extremist group in Karachi launched a campaign against un-Islamic practices in Pakistan, …
Read More »Credo of a Crouching Couch Potato
Sunday, March 23, 2003 Watching BBC and Al Jazeera (9-10.30 approx.) Both running live coverage of operations in Umm Qasr. BBC correspondent is "on a raised platform" with the officer (US marines) directing the operation and a cameraman (who has to duck every now and then - it is implied …
Read More »“Friendly Fire?” – the Peter Arnett Affair
When NBC and National Geographic fired Baghdad correspondent Peter Arnett for his comments to Iraqi state television, it seemed like the journalistic equivalent of 'friendly fire." As Tim Goodman pointed out in the San Francisco Chronicle, the affair raises several issues for debate among journalists. TBS reproduces an article from …
Read More »Moral Dilemmas of the Press
From The New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/11/opinion/11JORD.html? April 11, 2003 The News We Kept to Ourselves By EASON JORDAN ATLANTA - Over the last dozen years I made 13 trips to Baghdad to lobby the government to keep CNN's Baghdad bureau open and to arrange interviews with Iraqi leaders. Each time …
Read More »Parties to the Conflict
From The Daily Star (Lebanon) http://www.gvnews.net/html/dailynews/alert3948.html April 8, 2003 GVNews.Net Daily World By Rami G. Khouri The Daily Star (Lebanon) Between the biases, distortion and cheerleading of American and Arab television coverage of the Iraq war, a viewer of both U.S. and Arab broadcasts can piece together a picture of …
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