Seen and starting to be heard: women and the Arab media in a decade of change

Social Research, Fall, 2002 by Naomi Sakr

Satellite TV, the Internet, and Women 's Advocacy Groups

The last decade of the twentieth century saw considerable innovation at the organizational level in the Arab region in matters relating both to women and to the media. This innovation can be recounted in different ways. An account of developments in satellite television can be presented as a story of more media outlets, more outlets managed outside the direct control of governments, and more responsiveness to the competition for viewers created by the proliferation of satellite channels. But it can equally be told as a story about how existing material on government-run terrestrial stations was repackaged for satellite transmission, how channels that were nominally run by private entrepreneurs were actually supported by government figures, and how new program formats were adopted under exactly the same censorship constraints as the old ones they were supposed to replace.

Similarly, the burgeoning of women's groups in the region can be described in numerical terms and with reference to United Nations conferences on women and women's rights guarantees contained in international law. An account based on numbers would note the rise of NGOs focusing on women's status, the creation by governments of national commissions for women, and the increase in women entering the workforce in countries where women's participation in paid labor was previously very low.

Yet an alternative version of the same events would note the legal obstructions governments have placed in the way of NGOs, the vociferous and mounting public rejection of any policy perceived to foster a "Western agenda," the distance still to go before all governments in the region outlaw discrimination against women, and the high levels of female illiteracy. Moreover, female employees of deregulated privatized business are often working today under worse terms and conditions than applied when those businesses were state owned.

A major catalyst for media change was Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in August 1990. Satellite television in Arabic made its debut in December 1990 when the region's first dedicated Arabic-language satellite channel, the Egyptian Space Channel, was created from within Egypt's state broadcasting monopoly, the Egyptian Radio and Television Union (ERTU). As the most populous Arab country and historically a prolific media producer and exporter, Egypt was well placed to transmit programming beyond its own borders. From then on the ERTU, which is accountable to the minister of information, retained its monopoly on Egyptian terrestrial and satellite broadcasting by virtue of the exclusivity granted to it under Egyptian law. When Egypt launched its own satellite in 1998, the ERTU started to draw tentatively on a few independent production houses, but mostly relied on increasing its internal output in conjunction with the government ministries of health and education to fill the additional digital channels. A slight easing of the monopoly occurred in 2000 with the designation of a free zone near Cairo from which non-ERTU broadcasters were permitted to transmit programming by satellite. However, it was made clear that the ERTU, as 50 percent owner of the free zone, reserved the right to censor material transmitted from it via satellite into Egyptian homes (Sakr, 2001: 111). These developments took place against a background of limited penetration of satellite access in Egypt (Sakr, 2001: 113-4), combined with strict government control on the ownership and content of Egyptian newspapers and magazines (Article XIX, 1997: 3746). Following the introduction of the country's amended press law in 1996, the jailing of journalists and banning of publications became more frequent (Amnesty International, 2000). This pattern of continued government control over terrestrial broadcasting accompanied by clampdowns on the print media was replicated across the region, with private Lebanese and Palestinian broadcasters constituting the only exception. (2) Meanwhile, controls over the Internet were generally exercised indirectly through failures to expand or upgrade telephone networks or reduce telephone charges. In some countries they were also imposed directly, through cybercensorship systems designed to block access to certain sites (Human Rights Watch, 1999: 27-29). By 2002 the highest levels of Internet access (around 8 to 9 percent of the population) were to be found in Lebanon and in the small and wealthy Gulf states of Qatar, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Internet penetration in the poorer and more populous countries was mostly less than 1 percent of the population (UNDP, 2001: 60-2; Mahmoud, 2002).