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| Arabia |
| The War Inside the Arab Newsroom |
| 2005-01-03 |
| Abdul Rahman Al-Rashed, the general manager of Al Arabiya, a 24-hour satellite-news channel broadcasting from Dubai, has six plasma-screen TV's in his office on the floor of the channel's glowing, ultramodern newsroom set. They are always on. One is tuned to Al Arabiya itself, and depending on where the cameras are placed, Al-Rashed sometimes catches a glimpse of himself, pacing around his desk on his cellphone. Another shows Al Jazeera, the channel's main competition. A third is tuned to a new Saudi government satellite channel, and a fourth displays CNN. Al-Rashed likes to flip around on the other two -- from Al Hurra, the widely ignored news channel that the United States government started last February, to the BBC and then to Al Manar, the Hezbollah-owned station that was banned by the French and American governments last month for broadcasting anti-Semitic slanders and what a State Department spokesman called ''incitement to violence.'' Al-Rashed's job is to find a place for Al Arabiya within this array, preferably at the top of the ratings. For now, though, it is Al Jazeera, which was started in 1996 by the emir of the gulf state of Qatar, that sets the standard, and the tone, for Arab television news. According to a poll conducted last May by Zogby International and the University of Maryland, Al Jazeera is the first choice for 62 percent of satellite-news viewers in Jordan, 66 percent in Egypt and 44 percent in Saudi Arabia. In most countries in the poll, Al Arabiya came in a distant second, although the professor who designed the poll, Shibley Telhami, said it had captured a ''remarkable'' market share for a satellite channel that, at the time, had been on the air for only a year; 39 percent of satellite-news viewers said they watched Al Arabiya almost daily. And in Saudi Arabia, the biggest advertising market in the region, the ratings race is much closer. |
| Posted by:tipper |
| #2 Hi Lucky! Your Legions stand ready. |
| Posted by: Shipman 2005-01-03 2:43:59 PM |
| #1 Six plasma screens, I love those screens. Seems to me the new screening of America will come from our digital providers. Low monthly rates. But man programing is still the same. Will our Arab consumers get fed up with their marching bands? |
| Posted by: Lucky 2005-01-03 2:33:46 PM |