Middle East
Middle East
Proposed Arabic BBC Channel Regarded With Skepticism in the Middle East
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Lebanese men watch Al-Hurra in Beirut on February 16, 2004. (Photo: Ramzi Haidar/AFP-Getty Images) |
The BBC announced last month that it intends to set up an Arabic television station backed by the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) with a $50 million a year budget. This has been met with skepticism in the Middle East, coming so soon after the US-led war on Iraq, and hot on the heels of a US-government backed Arabic channel.
The BBC channel was requested by the FCO, a BBC spokesperson said, and would be based out of London, broadcasting 24 hours a day across the Arab world. The BBC added that the proposal was still under discussion between the FCO and the British Treasury, and a start up date had not been established.
The BBC has attempted to break into the Arab television market before, running an aborted attempt in the early 1990’s that closed down after backers pulled out.
"It was a lot friendlier climate back then and I think now they're going to have a much tougher time," said Sharif Hikmat Nashashibi, chairman of the London-based Arab Media Watch in a telephone interview.
"They didn't have the Arab competition they have now, and the political climate, in my view, is rightly hostile towards UK and US policy, and the BBC might be associated with that," he added.
Opening a channel in a region suspicious of British motivations after military involvement in Iraq is made more difficult by the last February's start up of Al-Hurra - "The Free One" - by the US State Department. Al-Hurra has not been well received in the region, generally considered a form of US soft propaganda.
The feeling in the Middle East, according to Jihad Ballout, a spokesman for the Qatar-based pan-Arab satellite Al-Jazeera, is that the BBC would be seen as complementing Al-Hurra.
"Because of Al-Hurra, the BBC is going to find it more difficult, as it is associated indirectly with the government. This government…is not viewed positively among a majority of Arabs because of their stance on Iraq. They are starting with a handicap if they actually go ahead," he said in a telephone interview.
Nashashibi said that parallels would be drawn with Al-Hurra, even if the BBC does not want them to be. "The BBC will probably have a bit more legitimacy than Al-Hurra but it will be seen in the same bracket, that this is a propaganda station and of British policy. I don't think it will go down that well," he said.
Nashashibi made the analogy of Arab countries setting up Hebrew language stations. "Israelis are not going to watch that, it is laughable. If Arabs can watch Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiyya, stations that are around and popular for good reason, why are they going to switch to a non-Arabic station which people will not fully trust, especially in the current climate?" he said.
The major danger for the Arabic BBC, said Jihad Ballout, is that if the channel does not attract Arab viewers, "they run the danger of their established media losing credibility." A central cause of contention is how the BBC will report issues, particularly the Arab-Israeli conflict.
The BBC has come under fire recently after the Glasgow University Media Group released a study, Bad News from Israel that showed that the BBC reported with a pro-Israeli bias.
"The BBC is considered more objective," said Nashashibi. "But if you consider the way that Palestine and Iraq are covered by Western broadcasters, it is very different from Arab television. It is very sanitized in the West - they give one view the same equality as the other. To Arabs this means why are you giving equal legitimacy and space to the viewers of occupiers?" The BBC would therefore be in a quandary Nashashibi said, of whether to report as it does in the West or adapt to the region. If the channel were to reflect Arab broadcasts, "they would be accused by their own government, by the West, of bias, double standards, and pandering to Arab audiences," he added.
It is more likely though that the Arab service would reflect the BBC World Service radio rather than the BBC's domestic service. The World Service reports in a different and more balanced fashion, and has been in existence for over 50 years.
The service is also very popular around the world, broadcasting in 43 languages to 146 million people every week. To attract such figures it is clearly not overtly propagandist. When the service started broadcasting recently in Baghdad, Basra and other Iraqi cities, 1.8 million tuned in weekly.
Television, however, is another medium, with visual media having a wider reach and greater impact than the airwaves. "The people proposing the Arabic service should have a close look at Al-Hurra, and perhaps figure out what they shouldn't do," Ballout said.
