Critics of the Arab media routinely got all aflutter over allegations of Iraqi payoffs to Arab journalists, inflating rumors and minor incidents into a blanket indictment. The always egregious Stephen Hayes comes to mind, with a breezy January piece declaring that al Jazeera was on Iraq's payroll... but, then, we already know the problems Hayes has with the concept of "evidence," so let's leave that aside.
The focus on Iraqi money in the Arab media has always been a distraction from the real, vastly more significant issue of Saudi money. The Saudis have long used their wealth to buy, influence, and control the Arab media. This, more than anything else, accounts for the stultifying quality of much of the Arab media from the 1970s into the early 1990s. A crucial factor in al Jazeera's success was its independence from Saudi money, which allowed it to say and do things which virtually no other Arab television station could or would. That's a major reason that it succeeded, and a major reason why the Saudis (and many other Arab governments, and the United States) came to loathe it.
I was reminded of all this by the veteran Jordanian journalist Tareq Masarweh. In an article in al Rai today, Masarweh takes a look at the Saudi-owned television stations and other media. And what issue dominates that media, to the near exclusion of all others? Lebanon's national beauty pageant, which as he puts it, has been receiving 24 hour coverage, of where the contestants sleep and what they eat and what they wear... Which, for Masarweh, raises the question of why Saudi stations find the Lebanese beauty contest so important, at a time when bombs are rocking the streets of Riyadh and the Saudi streets have been the scene of horrific terrorism. Not such a mystery, of course. The Saudis use their control of the media to prevent coverage of Saudi domestic affairs. Masarweh singles out the newspaper al Sharq al Awsat as the only Saudi-owned media which has seriously covered these internal Saudi affairs (I would also include al Hayat, but that's still a newspaper and not television).
It's quite ironic, once again, that the Bush administration seems quite happy to ignore this Saudi media control, and even to encourage it. The transfer of management at al Arabiya, for example, was all about imposing a more conservative line on that station even if it cost it market share - rewarded, in turn, with the Bush interview.
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