Thomas, Amos Owen. Imaginations & Borderless Television: Media, Culture and Politics Across Asia. New Delhi, India: Sage, 2005. Paperback. 290 pages. ISBN: 0-7619-3395-6. $23.50. Reviewed by Samaa Aly El-Batrawy This book is about exploratory research into the growth and development of transnational TV in Asia, analyzing its impact on advertising industries in …

Chalaby, Jean K. (Ed.). Transnational Television Worldwide: Toward a New Media Order. London: I.B. Tauris, 2005. 264 pages. Paperback. ISBN 1-85043-548-0. $24.95. Reviewed by Ralph D. Berenger When legendary American broadcast news pioneer Edward R. Murrow first saw a demonstration of television in the 1940’s as an extension of radio, he …

Moez Masoud is a 27-year-old Egyptian who hosts his own English-language Islamic talk shows, Parables from the Quran and Stairway to Paradise, on the Saudi-owned ART satellite network. With several new TV contracts in the works, including the possibility of a show on an American channel, the handsome young economics graduate …

An elderly man lays bedridden in his lower middle-class home in Shoubra, a largely Christian neighborhood near the heart of Cairo. Paralyzed for some 14 years following an injury to his spine, the man rarely leaves his home, as doing so has become an unbearable hassle. Until recently, this misfortunate …

“Any work that I do depends on the will of the audience.” (Ibrahim Nasr, Akhbar al-Nuguum, 433, 1/20/2001) Introduction Over the past few years, a growing trend in television is the seeming willingness to push the envelope of so-called “good taste.” While this is not a new phenomenon, we are …

Islamists have been some of the most ardent foes of reality programs on Arab television, forcing MBC’s Al Ra’is (Big Brother) off the air and staging protests or boycotts against LBC’s Star Academy and Al Wadi (The Farm). But now it seems at least some Islamists have decided to adopt a different approach: If you can’t …

The neo-conservative Weekly Standard has called it “the best hope of little Americas developing in the Middle East.”(1) New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman enthused that it was the closest thing to democracy the Arab world has ever seen.(2) Sheikh Abd al-Rahman al-Suadais, imam of the Grand Mosque of Mecca, has denounced them as …

Since the fall of 2005, the Egyptian press has speculated giddily about the fate of the state-owned broadcasting service, which is laden with debt, haunted by corruption scandals and grappling with over-employment and other inefficiencies. Since the 1990s, there media specialists, government officials and foreign aid agencies have discussed how …

Anyone who visits Lebanon will be struck by the excessive Lebanese use of space: Urbanisation literally is filling the space perpendicularly, up into the skies and the mountain ranges, and horizontally, as sprawling resorts or “developments” eat up huge chunks of the coast in Beirut and Doura, where two dumps …

(This article is based on a presentation at the Foreign Policy Research Institute on 19 April 2005). News in the Arab World Before the Age of Satellite TV Little more than a decade ago there was no such thing as television journalism in the Arab world. State-owned national television channels …