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 …
Read More »Calendar: December 2004 to November 2005
December 2004 2004 AEJMC Winter Meeting San Antonio, Texas, USA, 3-5 December, 2004 www.aejmc.org/convention Africa Electronic Privacy and Public Voice Symposium Cape Town, South Africa, 6 December, 2004 www.thepublicvoice.org/events/2004_csonetwork.html January 2005 Trans/National Film and Literature: Cultural Production and the Claims of History Tallahassee, Florida, USA, 27-29 January, 2005 http://english3.fsu.edu/~filmlit2005 March …
Read More »Satellite Chronicles: May to November 2004
Compiled by the editors May 2004 Abu Dhabi TV announces "a modest but varied" programming season to parallel that of other satellite channels. News programming is tapped to take a back seat compared to variety shows. The absence of "arts" programming is explained by the station by reference to its …
Read More »The Dark Desert Night is Alight: The Impact of War Visuals on Television Viewers and Print
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 …
Read More »Islamic Satellite Channels and Their Impact on Arab Societies: Iqra Channel-a Case Study
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 …
Read More »The Proposed Satellite Television Channel of the Organization of the Islamic Conference: A Response to Moral Panic?
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 …
Read More »Not Every Picture Tells a Story: A Death in Falluja
This article first appeared in The New York Times. All of life seems to be about denial--the denial of death, the denial of reality, the denial of everything that is convenient for us to deny. Photography, because of its causal relationship to the world, seems to give us the truth or …
Read More »Two Entertainment Issues Preoccupy Egyptian Press in Ramadan
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 …
Read More »Al Jazeera Update: More Datelines from Doha and a Code of Ethics
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 …
Read More »New Generation Camcorders
Camcorders have undergone major changes in the last year or two, perhaps more than at any time since their introduction in the late 1970s. These changes affect higher end professional models and even the affordable three-CCD (charged coupled device), with DV models costing only a few thousand US dollars. The …
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