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May 12, 2005

Comments

collounsbury

Perhaps they should put a good friend, former Arab Advisors media man and private equity investor in charge of the whole bloody show, dump the morons in DC, move the studios to Cyprus or whatever....

praktike

I love how al-Hurra is based in Bethesda and is in that new complex of buildings right next to the Montgomery Mall and Lockheed HQ.

Penta

Collounsbury: I'm not sure Cyprus would work. It's a bit out of the way from the transportation, cultural, etc. nexuses that are typically required by media types.

However, moving it from DC would seem smart.

Praktike: Hey, at least they're not based in Alabama or something.

plover

I was looking at the breakdowns by gender for the two surveys, and found something curious. (Note this is just me eyeballing their numbers not doing any actual analysis.) For al-Arabiya, al-Jazeera, and al-Hurra anyway (which I'm assuming are considered less "local" than the other Arab-run – as distinct from Arab-owned – sources), both surveys indicate distributions that are shaped about the same for males and females, but which peak in different places. However, in the Cairo data, the distribution peaks for females are shifted more toward the "trustworthy" end, while in the Jordan data, the distribution peaks for males are shifted more toward "trustworthy". In other words, it appears that in Cairo, on average, women find these outlets more trustworthy than men, while in Jordan the opposite is true. I don't know how much confidence to have in this observation, since some of the results are within the margin of error, but the pattern is there in each case. (And the pattern does not hold for the Arab outlets I'm considering more "local", where as often as not the distributions for males and females are not really the same shape.)

This can be contrasted with the results for the Western sources: CNN and BBC World. In Cairo, while the distributions are nowhere near as well matched in shape as they are for the Arab sources, the overall shift toward the "trustworthy" end for the female distribution is even more marked. However, the Jordan data for the Western outlets is very different from any other sample I looked at. Not only are the men far less trusting of these outlets than women, reversing the trend for the Arab sources, but this difference is far wider than for any of the other samples I've looked at in either dataset: CNN and BBC World were considered "Not trustworthy" by 55.0% and 59.1%, respectively, of men, but only 10.2% and 12.3% of women.

A superficially plausible conclusion is that Jordanian men have an exceptionally pronounced bias towards Arab-run media (even to a limited degree, al-Hurra – which is despised by Jordanian women to the same degree the Western outlets are by the men) as against Western media that is not widely shared by Jordanian women or by Cairenes of either gender. Is this a result that would be expected? And if so why?

Why are women's opinions in Cairo more similar to men's opinions than is the case in Jordan? Is the status of women very different in the two countries?

It also looks like, overall, Cairenes have a distinctly more positive view of Western media (including al-Hurra) than Jordanians. Is this expected? Is there any straightforward way to characterize the difference between Jordanian and Egyptian attitudes towards Americans or Westerners in general?

Is the real problem that I'm just reading way too much into these statistics?

Anyway, I'm probably asking too many questions. Many thanks for any attention you might be able to spare for them.

judy

Love your blog. Think we might ever get al-Jazeera broadcast in English for us stuck out here in stalingrad, tx actually if you guys ever do get democracy, would you mind getting out over here and give us a jump start? the toxic texan in the white house seemed to have outsourced our constitution and bill of rights. Also we got all these creepy american taliban from the christrian wingnuts now. they got some problems maybe we could hook em up with osoma they got soooooooooo much in common.

Peace

the aardvark

plover - that is absolutely fascinating.. you looked at the data a lot more closely than I did! I have no real thoughts on how to explain those patterns, but I am reminded of this interesting focus group on women's issues that Brian Katulis did for Freedom House last year. If I recall correctly, he also found that men and women in Cairo looked for different things in the media, and appreciated them differently. If I have time later, I'll try to follow up.

plover

I just happened on your post from back in February on the CSS study of Arab public opinion. You say that that figures for a "not positive at all" attitude toward the US are 58% and 63% respectively for Jordan and Egypt. This tends to confirm my general impression that Jordanians and Egyptians would have similar feelings about the US, which is one reason I thought the observations above worth noting.

Another idea that occurred to me today is that the disparities might have something to do with urban vs non-urban populations, i.e. if data were taken for all of Egypt rather than just Cairo would it look more like the Jordan data? I suppose there would even be some way to correct for the urban/non-urban proportions of each country's population.

Also, in that earlier post, when you say that "Egyptians almost unanimously despise Bush", are you saying that Bush is despised in Egypt more than in, say, Jordan or Morocco or Bahrain (if those are appropriate comparisons)?

the aardvark

Couldn't say in Morocco and Bahrain, but I'd say that the numbers (and anecdotal evidence and cultural stuff and all that) put Egypt and Jordan pretty close together.

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