GEETAM 2004 MODULES

election campaigns offer the public a chance to be heard in political debates more directly than is usually the case. Media coverage is
supposed to reflect this, which is why the chapter by giovanna maiola and roman ward, based on media monitoring during the
palestinian presidential election campaign, can also help to answer questions about where media outlets stand relative to voters and
political elites. Here a comparison of palestinian and pan-arab television stations proves illuminating, not least because palestinians
tend to watch the latter in p to local and national alternatives, despite the fact that pan-arab channels devote less time overall to
palestinian affairs than local palestinian channels can. Maiola and ward note the devastating impact on the palestinian economy of
conflict arising from the israeli occupation and the affect of consequentdangers and restrictions on local journalism. Against this
backdrop, their examination of television coverage demonstrates that the spectrum of active Palestinian political forces was better
reflected on al-jazeera than on the palestinian national channel, pbc tv. In particular, the two stations adopted different approaches to
hamas, which boycotted the presidential race but still, in the worlds of maiola and ward, represented a crucial interlocutor and a main
referent for election debates. Hamas was relatively prominent on al-jazeera, where it received coverage roughly equal to that of fatah.
Its virtual absence from pbc tv, on the other hand, testified to a national media system where by the ability to reflect views is dictated by
factors outside journalists control. It follows from this that, if factors external to journalism shape editorial decisions, efforts to promote
a peace agenda solely through journalism training may be misplaced. Yet, as copiously documented by bruce stanley in his chapter on
aid for peace-building through the arab media, us and european donors have spent millions on media intervention programmes that
talk peace and democratization with journalists but fail to consider either the structural underpinnings of conflict or media structures.
Stanley s work, in uncovering how and why donors have shown such limited concern with the complex and problematic processes of
conflict transformation, also explains the backlash among arab civil society groups against projects that promoted dialogue in a way
that was decontextualised and oblivious to hard political realities. Seeing things in a different light in contrast to the sparse evidence of
critical media content forcing arab governments to change policy or respond seriously to inconvenient public concerns, examples are
plentiful government figures appearing to adopt television-friendly modes of conduct that were unfamiliar before access to satellite
television and the interest spread through the arab world. Such examples include simple things, such as answering media requests that
would once have been ignored. Hala gorani, a syrian-american anchor for cnn, told the daily star in march : i have found that even in
syria i can get a governmental reaction in five minutes. Ten years ago she said, it would take you a week to get one. Other examples
may be more elaborate, such as the unprecedented invitation to a private sector media personality to stage a three-part televised
interview with the egyptian president, hosni mubarak, months ahead of the country s first multi-candidate presidential election
campaign in since the speeded-up syrian government reaction to a media query is still likely to be a stock answer and since there was
never any chance of mubarak losing the election, or even of other presidential candidates gaining equivalent airtime on state television,
it is reasonable to ask why political leaders should feel any greater need to play the media game today than they did beforehand. In the
old days they were content for television news to consist of a seemingly endless and substance-free listing of the doings of the head of
state if government opponents are still effectively crushed today, by laws and intimidation, what exactly is it about the new media that
prompts those in power to adjust to more demanding media conventions and routines? A possible answer might be similar to the one
joshua meyrowitz produced in the to explain why electronic media, especially television, differ so strikingly from print media in their
effect on social behaviour. He argued that it was not the power of any particular television message that accounted for change, but the
way the whole medium of television physically reorganised the social settings within which people interact. Instead of media content
and its influence, meyrowitz focused on the possibility that new media transform the home and other social spheres into new social
environments making private behaviours public, and private places accessible to the outside world, thus leading to forms of interaction
that were once exclusive to situations of immediate physical proximity. They do not just give us quicker or more thorough access to
events and behaviors Meyrowitz wrote; they give us, instead, new events and new behaviors little wonder then, he suggested, that
widespread rejection of traditional roles and hierarchies began in the late s among the first generation of americas to have been
exposed to television before learning to read meyrowitz s approach came in for criticism for being media-centric and technologically
deterministic, in attributing change to media technology rather than seeing the adoption of technology as bound up with relations of
power. Such criticism might seem justified by the fact that television, both public and private, was around in the arab countries from
the s and s without apparently triggering new behaviors; instead it suffered from a lack of credibility among viewers, who perceived
broadcasting as a mere propaganda machine for the ruling elite nevertheless, meyrowitz himself argued that societies change in their
patterns of access to, and exclusion from, certain situations and social information, and that these patterns are linked to media use.
Patterns of access changed in arab society with the injection of credibility delivered by satellite channels that broke taboos, which not
only encouraged people to gain access to new media but also crucially ensured that awareness about access also increased. The
significance of that awareness for public behavior was illustrated by a lebanese protest organizer in martyres square in march who
said: why should we be afraid of syria now? The world is watching us on television. The logic of this analysis is not that leaders will be
forced to act more democratically if their actions are exposed to public view. On the contrary, violence against demonstrators captured
on camera in cairo, damascus and elsewhere proves that to be untrue. It is simply that people gain a different sense of their own
potential when they can use electronic media to overcome restrictions on social interaction that are imposed by physical space. In the
case of internet users, as albrecht hofheinz shows in his chapter for this book, the socialisation process online is quite different from the
one that takes place in ordered, close-knit, offline communities, where traditional world-views and power hierarchies may be
considered self-evident. Online, individuals are faced with never-ending choice. They become more conscious of their individuality and
more distinctly aware of the role of choice in creating social communities, knowledge and values a process that hofheinz associates with
a growing assertion of the self through blogging and through personal interpretation of islam. In the case of television, marwan kraidy
finds that audiences interaction with each other and with programme makers, through the weekly voting routines of reality tv
entertainment, has led to the development of a new political vocabulary. His chapter, on the singing competition, star academy,
highlights ways in which lebanese veiwers translated their personal participation and the programme s reliance on audience
interactivity info s for communicating ideas about political and sociocultural change. Meanwhile, as kraidy demonstrates, kuwaiti
islamists strongly resisted plans to translate the social interaction offered by the television showinto physical access for audience and
singers at a star academy concert staged in kuwait. Towards a public sphere? Intrinsic to any discussion of media and politics is the
notion of the public sphere, which has been widely evoked in the growing literature on new arab media as a rubric for discussion of
news journalism and current affairs debates. Dale eickelman s observation about people having a say in governance quoted above, is
fairly typical in this respect. Lately, however, there has been some scholarly agonising over the degree to which the public sphere
concept fits new phenomena emerging in the arab media landscape. Since public sphere theory directs us to consider how far critical-

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