Being a business journalist has never been easy in the notoriously tight-lipped UAE. But will investors tolerate Dubai & Co’s culture of keeping quiet amid a global financial crisis, asks Contributing Editor Dana El-Baltaji.

The head of Saudi Arabia’s Sharia courts made waves during Ramadan when he said that satellite channel owners were liable for execution for airing “indecent programming.” But this controversy goes far beyond broadcast standards, argues Andrew Hammond.

More than ever before, governments and pressure groups sought to use social media like Facebook and YouTube to rally support during the Gaza conflict. Why did so many of these attempts fizzle? Managing Editor Will Ward investigates.

Some feared the 2008 novel The Jewel of Medina would create the fiercest backlash among Muslims since the Danish cartoon scandal. So why hasn’t it? Shereen El Feki looks at the politics surrounding the book’s publication.

A pitched battle on the streets of Beirut backed Hizbullah’s opponents into a corner last May. But it was media savvy and the powerful rhetoric of Hassan Nasrallah that turned a tactical victory into a strategic success, argues David Wilmsen. Features video and full translations of three speeches.

In such a crowded market, how can newspapers possibly resist advertisers’ demands to produce business-friendly coverage? Peyman Pejman puts the tough questions to editors of the UAE’s six English language dailies.

Jabbar al-Obaidi’s typology of the region’s media is a valuable contribution, writes John Measor, but imprecise analysis and failure to engage with existing scholarship undermines the work as a whole.

Hamid Dabashi gives “blood and bone” to the lives and predicaments of Iran’s filmmakers. Yet his conceptions of “realism” seem to be surrogates for aesthetic judgments, argues Farouk Mitha.

Massad’s work on Arab sexuality in literature and media in reference to Said’s Orientalism will no doubt promote fruitful discussions, says Stephanie Tara Schwartz.

Hosam El Sokkari, the man behind the BBC's move into Arabic-language television, insists the new channel will not be the British Alhurra. So why would the British public want to spend Foreign Office money on a channel in the Arab world? Co-Editor Lawrence Pintak finds out.