The media landscape in Iraq has undergone a radical transformation since state-run Iraqi television abruptly went off air following the US-led invasion in March 2003. With no state television and the ownership of satellite dishes banned by the Baathist regime, Iraqis were, quite literally, starved for information. As a result, …

Every Ramadan is more or less the same. People are tired, traffic is bad. Every day at dusk, thankful families gather at home to break their day-long fast. And afterwards, they indulge in another holiday tradition: Ramadan soap operas. This year saw the usual glut of such entertainment, produced in …

Arabic language satellite television has over the past three years broadcast a number of excellent historical dramas set in late antiquity or in early Islamic periods.(1) These programs usually are first shown as part of the Ramadan line up, guaranteeing a large viewing audience.(2) One of the new aspects of …

The Road Not Traveled One of the most intriguing Arabic-language television dramas in recent years was The Road to Kabul (2004), which told the story of the Arab and Afghan mujahideen in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Or rather tried to tell, since The Road to Kabul never made it past episode eight. The state of Qatar, …

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 …

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 …