Courtney C. Radsch is a scholar and freelance journalist whose work focuses on the Arab media and politics. This article is the first part of the speech given at the “Al Jazeera and the New Arab Media” conference, organized last May by the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Part two
When the power shifts from the state to journalists
Controlling this symbolic power has been the policy of Arab governments ever since television’s introduction into the region. By the mid-1970s every Arab country had built its own terrestrial television system and many had satellite ground stations (Rugh 2004, xiv). State-owned media outlets have traditionally been used by their governments to portray the regime in a particular way. Since those in power depend on a mixture of coercion and consent to maintain their rule, they use the media, especially terrestrial broadcasting, to manufacture consent by reflecting the agenda of those in power. Thus it is illegal and punishable by fines and imprisonment to criticize the government in Egypt. The ban against government (and religious) criticism has a long history that can be traced back to the Ottoman Empire’s first press law for the region in 1857. There is also “a long tradition of Arab states, especially Egypt and Saudi Arabia, attempting to influence what is written about them in the Arab world press” that dates back to the Lebanese civil war.
Control over media production and dissemination, however, is made increasingly difficult by the distributional changes in the communication sphere and the growing importance of power that lies outside of traditional military or economic conceptions. This has been described as soft power or symbolic power and is inherent in theories about attraction, framing, and agenda-setting. The power to define the parameters of debate, to take away the status quo as Al Jazeera has, or to bring topics into the public sphere gives the news media, and journalists as the creators of content, an increasingly important type of power. Thus in an era when soft power is increasingly important, mass media provide means of accumulating symbolic capital and influencing public debate that are essential to leaders and opposition movements seeking public support, a public that can no longer be assumed to end at the state’s borders. Such news undermines official authority by reporting facts on the ground, from protests to poverty, that challenge state authority and credibility. “The simple report, the very fact of reporting, of putting on record as a reporter, always implies a social construction of reality that can mobilize (or demobilize) individuals or groups” and thus in political struggles the “capacity to impose a way of seeing the world” is at stake (Bourdieu). As this power shifts from the state to journalists, the government must compete to have their versions of social reality accepted in the marketplace of ideas.
A new generation of journalists
Through most of the 1990s the state and political parties were still able to use the media as a political tool and nefariously impinged on the development of an independent journalistic field, hiring journalists to convey their messages to the public so that they were mouthpieces rather than professionals. But as changing perceptions of the media’s role in politics, pressure for democratization and a free press, and new ICT technology took hold in the last years of the 20th century, competition among Arabic news channels skyrocketed. As stations compete to attract local and regional audiences with higher expectations than in the past, journalists have begun to define themselves in relation to audience expectations rather than state mandates. In the past, journalism was a function of state power and thus journalistic identity was contiguous with the political field. The government would “turn a blind eye” to everything from finances, to budgets, to circulation claims as long as it had control over media content. Control over the defining product of journalism, content, stunted the development of an autonomous journalistic field and professional habitus. Habitus refers to the dispositions and cultural structures that shape self-perception and identity and transmit social power, which are composed of structured social relations comprised of commonly understood rules, norms, practices and authority. The journalistic habitus could not develop until the journalistic field emerged. The notion of habitus helps explain strategies to maintain identity and power, such as the strategy of professionalization. Until the imperative of competition permeated the media environment, the political field conditioned journalists’ cultural structures and practices, whereas today the emergence of a relatively autonomous journalistic field governed by its own relations of power and practices has given rise to a new generation of journalists that identify themselves according to a professional habitus and as distinct and separate from the state.
In today’s world of soft power and mediated communication it seems that we have indeed moved from the industrial era to a code-governed era in which reality is a frame of reference, a belief in truth that is performative (especially when performed as late-breaking news) but ultimately subjective. Communication systems are linked to one’s very understanding of reality, and thus changes in these systems are related to conceptual changes that influence intuitional changes in the political realm. The news, then, is an “imposition of a definition of the world,” constructed through interactions between social agents located in various fields who are dependent on the journalistic field to present their vision of the world to the public. If knowledge or “reality” is constructed through social interaction, in which communication is central, then the media and journalists are critical actors in the production of reality. And if power derives from the structure of knowledge, people with knowledge or control over its communication, are especially significant. Journalists, as the people on the frontlines of knowledge production and projection through the news media, are therefore especially important as “cue givers” in focusing attention on what is important in an information saturated context.
Events transmitted by television must first be translated into a story before becoming a “communicative event,” a process that privileges the reproduction of dominant meanings by journalists and producers who operate according to a professional code (Hall). Hall contends that such professional codes tend to reproduce the hegemony of the state, but his analysis of Western commercial media does not hold in the Egyptian context. The professionalization of Arab journalists occurs in part through criticism of the status quo in order to build credibility with the audience. This does not in and of itself necessitate a challenge to state power, but since the discourse now includes Islamists, liberal democrats, and opposition movements, it challenges the hegemony of the state and its control over social discourse. Journalists, like the producers of Egyptian serials, are becoming “critical mediators” who work within their own professional codes and toward their own goals, which do not always parallel those of the state.
A fierce competition
As it turns out, much of the content produced by journalists often implicitly attacks the status quo via messages about liberalization, reform, and democratization on one hand, or the Islamist project on the other. The logic of abundance, instantaneity, and availability of information governing today’s modes of communication has favored the development of social norms premised on the production and dissemination of information across territorial and social boundaries and the vocalization of opinion in a public sphere that transcends these boundaries. The distributional change brought on by satellite television and globalization favors the immediacy and visibility as producers constantly seek new items to fill the news hole. The 24-hour news cycle must be fed. State new services have felt the pressure of deadlines and timeliness, forcing them to get to the scene quicker and on-air more reliably. Thus journalists at state-run stations who said they have felt pressured by this competition end up covering topics they might not otherwise be inclined publicize. Competition has become so fierce that the state has even put up obstacles to prevent its competitors from getting the story first. For example, during the 2006 Dahab bombings, Nile News wanted to get the story first so the reporters were flown there in a special plane and other stations were initially prevented from entering the area. Thus Al Arabiya and Al Jazeera rebroadcast Egyptian footage, lending credibility to the state broadcasters who got there first and whose coverage was deemed good enough for the independent stations to use. But although Egyptian state news may be increasingly competitive when covering breaking news like bombings, this competitive edge does not extend to opposition activities like protests. For the time being most state news try to ignore mass demonstrations, indicating perhaps the vested interests of those journalists who, in order to maintain their jobs and positions in the field, may be less inclined to challenge the status quo.
Where the truth lies
Most journalists nonetheless proclaim that the government can no longer ignore that something occurred and that lying has become increasingly difficult; but this pressure is not always acute enough to compel coverage. State media nonetheless continue to ignore some important events for both political and financial reasons. When a Nile News journalist was sent to cover the war in Iraq he had to stay at an inexpensive Amman hotel and travel five hours each way to the Iraqi border because the government-run station did not have enough money to pay for his expenses. The influx of foreign aid workers, journalists, and contractors has caused enormous inflation in the border region, pricing out those without the means to pay Western prices for hotels and supplies. Of course, the choice not to pay these reporting expenses reflects an economic influence on news decisions that could very well have a political stimulus.
Many news choices, however, more clearly reflect political rather than financial choices. NileTV, for example, did not cover the May 2005 protests in which security forces sexually assaulted women protesters. Nor did it cover the huge demonstrations in downtown Cairo that occurred during and Arab League meeting, just the official proclamation of the Arab ministers. A producer for that station who now works for Al Jazeera said she knew without asking that the demonstration “wouldn’t work” on NileTV so it wasn’t covered. But they were shown on Al Jazeera and in the newspapers, so the public not only “found out” about them, but also found fault with the government channels for not telling them about them. By not covering the protests the state could not tell its story and thus left the framing of the news entirely to non-state media. Thus media professionals, rather than state officials, controlled the narrative and images that defined the protests as oppositional and widespread, a frame reinforced by the lack of a competing story from state media. And unlike the increasing polarization of news consumption in the West, where people choose to reinforce their beliefs by reading or watching the outlets that most closely adhere to those beliefs, people in the Arab world, and Egypt in particular, are accustomed to comparing coverage from a variety of news outlets to figure out where the truth lies. Even taxi drivers, for example, say they read the state newspaper Al Ahram for the official viewpoint, Al Masry Al Yaum for the independent version, and watch Al Jazeera for “the truth.”
Universal standards
The constitutive rules of journalism are changing as competition with regional and international media intensifies and new activities like blogging challenge traditional conceptions of journalism. What it means to “do” journalism and “be” a journalist is shifting as new publication forums emerge, and professionalization and independence from the political sphere increases. And it appears that with an increasing array of news choices based on a variety of sociopolitical models, journalists and publics are less inclined to perceive state-directed journalism as legitimate. The regulative rules of journalism are also shifting as professional journalists express disdain for the traditional way of doing journalism in the Arab world and aspire to what they see as universal professional norms like accuracy, balance, double-sourcing, and using a variety of sources. Egyptian journalists routinely cited respect, balance, accuracy and finding “the truth” as the primary goals of good journalism and the objectives for which journalists should strive (3). Although a 1988 cross-national study found disagreement on norms and standards of journalism and concluded that there were not emerging universal standards, Egyptian journalists contradict those findings.
They expressed a belief in universal journalistic ethics that were not particular to the West, indicating that an increasingly interconnected world of information and communication technology favors a convergence of news values across political and national cultures. Or as one journalist put it, “the standard of the media in the Washington Post and New York Times is the same as here, but the targets and subjects are completely different”. In fact, a more recent study on cultural communication values found that the divide between Western and Islamic journalism is closing because of an emerging intercultural consensus on journalism ethics. The values professed by Egyptian journalists today sound similar to the common ethical principles that emerged from this study – truth, respect for another person’s dignity, and no harm to the innocent. Thus traditional practices of journalism such as being paid for story placements, parroting government leaders, and covering up sensitive issues are disadvantaged by the new open media environment and a journalistic identity premised on professionalism.
Of course practice may lag behind pronouncements. Journalistic standards are currently invoked discursively more than practically, but the fact that journalists profess these ideals and identify them as legitimate indicates that they constitute what it means to do good journalism. Such regulative discourse controls the practice of journalism from within the field and restricts the right to speak with journalistic authority. There is minimal slippage between what is meant by balance, accuracy, and sourcing in Egypt compared to the West. Many journalists have worked for Western news outlets and therefore use the same vocabulary. The syllabi and books used in journalism courses at American University in Cairo, for example, address these concepts in a way comparable to such courses in the West. The convergence of professional standards, like accuracy and balance, and competitive criteria, like engaging program formats and live coverage, indicate constitutive and regulative rules of journalism that transcend national boundaries and political systems. As information becomes more accessible, easier to find, un-tethered from location and nationality, and increasingly subject to public feedback, the producers of information are competing for credibility and legitimacy in order to gain audience share at the local, national, and transnational levels.
The voices of ordinary people
A primary responsibility of the press from the perspective of the Arab journalists I interviewed is to bring the voices of ordinary people into the public arena. Women, opposition members, Islamists, dissidents, youth and other traditionally absent voices increasingly appear in the mainstream media as news programs compete. The content of Arabic news is far more representative now compared to when official ceremonies and the minutiae of official life comprised the bulk of news content. Satellite news stations attempt to differentiate themselves by the emphasis they place on “the people,” meaning that by definition good journalism cannot solely rely on government. The competition is especially fierce among Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya, both claiming to prevail in their attention to average people. For example, Al Arabiya’s Cairo bureau chief said that she believed the greater emphasis her station places on average people distinguishes the station from its competitors, but Al Jazeera claims the same. This emphasis on bringing diverse voices into the public sphere is challenging notions of public and private, global and local, often demonstrating that such concepts are in fact co-constitutive and socially constructed. A new rule is emerging as the public plays a more active role in journalism, from demands placed on news sources to representation of public views to participation in the production of news. The new rule is giving voice to public opinion. Search engines, blogs, interactive news sites, and other features of the Internet, coupled with increased competition from private, state, and foreign media are raising professional criteria throughout the field, while putting a premium on public participation via representation in the media. The state is no longer in control of media content, losing control over one of the most important tools in the creation of public opinion and the most dynamic element of the state’s ideological structure.
Conclusions
If we agree with Egyptian democracy advocate Saad Eddin Ibrahim that “Arab satellites have done probably for the Arab world more than any organized critical movement could have done, in opening up the public space, in giving Arab citizens a newly found opportunity to assert themselves,”, then one begins to see how lapses in state control could be exploited and distributional changes capitalized on. These apertures confirm the relative importance of soft power to create knowledge and truth, and the crucial role of the media in the production of reality. Since the Egyptian state no longer completely dominates the journalistic field, definitional power over the representation of reality on the screens of millions of viewers is no longer the state’s domain; it is increasingly the domain of journalists. Thus the new Egyptian journalism fundamentally challenges the hegemony of the state and its power to portray itself. It also gives power to the public at the expense of the state. The media no longer simply transmit information from the state to the people, but from the people to the state. Ordinary people figure more prominently on the news than ever before with a corresponding decrease in protocol news, and the pubic enjoys greater agenda-setting power through access to the airwaves. Similarly the importance of the audience, because of competition, gives the public a say in what constitutes news, “giving voice to the voiceless” as Al Jazeera’s slogan proclaimed. Yet despite the visibility of ordinary people, most news focuses on Cairo and national politics or foreign policy. There is little local news coverage or outlets devoted to coving communities outside of the capital. Thus while the state must adapt to a media logic at the national level, there is minimal accountability or visibility at the local level because journalists are so focused on the top. The regionalization of audiences may thus be a negative factor for local domestic coverage, since the media are competing primarily at a national and regional level.
Even as journalistic professionalism and independence continue to make strides, there are no guarantees. Whereas Al Jazeera played such an important role in putting pressure on the Egyptian and Arab information environment to open up, a disturbing drift may be underway. Al Jazeera appears to have moderated its criticism of Egypt and Saudi Arabia and shifted its emphasis on political reform to focus more on an Islamist agenda. If Al Jazeera ceases to be the proponent of change it has been thus far, the competitive pressure it has put on other news outlets may diminish. Yet after more than a decade of leadership, Al Jazeera’s singular importance has been diluted by the emergence of respectable competitors like Al Arabiya and Abu Dhabi TV, and its continued economic ties to the ruler of Qatar. Egyptian and other Arab journalists have gotten a taste of freedom and professionalism, and they seem to like it. They have developed a vested interest in the new journalism, with the very nature of their identity intricately bound up with their role as professionals, making it unlikely that they will give up what they have won, even if it means confrontation with the state.
Furthermore, even as professional journalism is developing in Egypt and across the Arab world, the nature of journalism itself is changing with the proliferation of citizen journalism forums that are changing the construction of social knowledge. Mainstream journalism must increasingly compete with alternative sources of information and news, even as these alternative sources feed back into the content of mainstream media. People are now not only part of the news in the Arab world, they are creating news and disseminating it via the Internet and mobile phones. The traditional separation between information producer and consumer is fading, and hierarchies of authority are breaking down as journalists worldwide lose their privileged status as purveyors of information. Thus even as professional media outlets are transforming the media environment and the nature of journalism in the Arab world, a revolution in the very role that information and communication technologies play in the lives of citizens is underway. Nonetheless, the mainstream media continue to play a crucial role in people’s daily lives, with television remaining the largest source of news in Egypt and playing a central role in political decisions. The advances in journalism made over the past few years have been critical to making the state more visible, more accountable, and less hegemonic as it adapts to a new media logic.
(3) The idea of respect, however, is problematic, since it implies that some type of higher authority can determine whether coverage is respectful, and what topics are deserving of this respect.
How Al Jazeera is challenging and improving Egyptian journalism (Part One)