ARTS The first generation to watch television, anywhere, is always rocked and shocked by it. Its power, coming through a box in one’s own living room, telling you things you didn’t know with a calm, un-coercive authority never found in the home, the classroom or the street, is giddying. Watching the BBC’s first, mid-1960s, satire shows as a child in a Scots fishing village was to see political leaders of huge national authority and distance mocked by smart young men and women, instant role models for we village intellectuals. I combed my hair forward to resemble the quiff affected by David - now Sir David - Frost, presenter of That Was The Week That Was, and persuaded some other counter-culture types to put on a satirical review in the hall of the biggest kirk, coolly received by the village elders.
Television is enormously destabilising - even when tightly controlled. Every Christmas, Soviet television would broadcast scenes of beggars shivering outside department store windows in New York, thus demonstrating the cruelty of capitalism. The Soviet masses didn’t bother with the beggars: they strained to see what was in the shop windows. Pent-up consumerism, aggravated by such glimpses of material wealth, was a large contributor to the implosion of the system.
Now the Arab masses are experiencing something similar. From a few, highly controlled, state-religious channels, Arab television has reached out across borders via satellite: al-Arabiya, al-Jazeera and others are streaming into palaces, apartments, huts and tents all over the Arab world - and rocking and shocking it.
They mean to do so. Al-Jazeera has been much reviled by the present US administration for its anti-Americanism and its implicit encouragement of the insurgents in Iraq, and some of that has foundation: the station covered the US invasion of Iraq and its aftermath in a way that made its opposition plain. But it wasn’t wholly propagandist, either: it went to some trouble to get US and British politicians and officials on to its news programmes, and it let them speak at length.
It seems now to be as keen to be seen as a scourge of Middle Eastern conservatism as of US neo-conservatism. The American international affairs specialist John Mroz - who runs the New York-based EastWest Institute - visited al-Jazeera’s Qatar headquarters last month for a planned two-hour discussion. He found himself spending a 14-hour day in the station, being regaled by everyone he met - technicians, news presenters, producers - with their desire to be understood as a thorn in the flesh of the region’s rulers.
”It’s a mission-driven channel,” Mroz told me afterwards. “It’s about reform and democracy in the Arab world. Israel and Palestine is now a secondary thing for them. The channel’s staff say it was the Iraqi elections which was the tipping point. They kept the cameras on those elections for two days. They reported the bomb blasts which went off at the same time, but they didn’t make a big thing of them. The big thing was the voting.
”I heard this all over the region,” Mroz went on. “People were talking about the election coverage they saw on al-Jazeera. They experienced these elections on television, and because what they saw came via al-Jazeera they believed it - they didn’t see it as US propaganda. The people at al-Jazeera told me that they feel they have a duty to represent the realities of the Arab world to the west. They say they’re for openness and democracy, but when America supports dictators, then of course they’re against that.”
Al-Jazeera as more neo-con than Paul Wolfowitz? Why not? The station has much to gain from increased freedom in the region. And it thinks it’s winning: one of its producers told Mroz that he had noticed, in interviews and talk shows they did from Saudi Arabia, that women once scared to be identified were now giving their names, and that people in general were more blunt in giving their views about what was wrong in their countries.
When she was in London last month, I asked the Canadian Muslim author (and critic of Islam) Irshad Manji how she viewed the effect of the new Arab media on Arab Muslims. She said the debates were freer and more critical, but also pointed to what might be called the “beggars by the shop windows” effect. She said: “I was interviewed by an Italian woman journalist who told me that the rise of US tele-novellas [soap operas] had had a profound effect on Italian women, because these programmes showed women standing up for themselves and taking decisions, and this combated the chauvinism of Italian society. Pop culture can be more powerful than the news. It could help liberate women in the Arab world from second-class status.”
Noha Mellor, another doughty woman critic-from-within of Arab culture, has been more pessimistic about the media - pointing, in her book The Making of Arab News, to their general timidity in the face of still-powerful autocrats, and tendency to rely on denunciations of the US and Israel in place of inquiry about their own societies’ shortcomings. She admits, however, that “competition among the new satellite channels has pushed them to arrange more daring political talk shows” - and that this competition is beginning to redirect criticism away from the familiar foreign targets towards domestic ones.
When - according to Mellor - President Mubarak of Egypt visited the modest headquarters of al-Jazeera, he asked: “All this noise comes from this matchbox?” Big noises come from small boxes now - and the enemy is within Arab living rooms.
