Abstract

The terrorist attacks on September 11 2001, were a turning point for Arab media studies in the West, as attention shifted to studying local and non-Western media, particularly their discourse on geopolitical and international relations issues. The rise of satellite channels and social media, and the Arab uprisings of 2010-2011 fed this new way of consuming information, with young people, bloggers, and journalists open to new technologies. Researchers have focused on the role of the press in political development and media freedom, often studying the classification of press bodies according to their degree of freedom or allegiance to political power. The Arab press, when dealing with conflicts, have focused on geopolitics and international relations, often participating in consolidating the influence of states to which they belong. The media can also participate in the cultural, ideological, political, and economical influence of non-state actors or those not directly linked to the states.

Résumé

Les attentats terroristes du 11 septembre 2001 ont marqué un tournant dans l’étude des médias arabes en Occident, l’attention s’étant portée sur l’étude des médias locaux et non occidentaux, en particulier leur discours sur les questions géopolitiques et les relations internationales. L’essor des chaînes satellitaires et des médias sociaux, et les soulèvements arabes de 2010-2011, ont nourri cette nouvelle façon de consommer l’information, avec des jeunes, des blogueurs et des journalistes ouverts aux nouvelles technologies. Les chercheurs se sont concentrés sur le rôle de la presse dans le développement politique et la liberté des médias, étudiant souvent la classification des organes de presse selon leur degré de liberté ou d’allégeance au pouvoir politique. La presse arabe, traitant des conflits, s’est concentrée sur la géopolitique et les relations internationales, participant souvent à consolider l’influence des États auxquels elle appartient. Les médias peuvent également participer à l’influence culturelle, idéologique, politique et économique des acteurs non étatiques ou non directement liés aux États.

Key words : Press in the Arab world, international relations in media discourse, geopolitics in media discourse, media as a tool and space for public diplomacy.

 

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The terrorist attacks of September 11 in the United States have profoundly marked the studies of the Arab media in the West. This was one of the main turning points, as the attention of researchers is directed towards the study of local and non-Western media. The researchers were interested in what the “Arabs” think through their media.

What was exciting was the media’s discourse on geopolitical and international relations issues. It was certainly not the media themselves. The press then becomes a meta-subject as Tourya Guaaybess aptly puts it[1].

This craze took place in a context marked by the rise in power of satellite channels, mainly Al-Jazeera, from the 1990s and the advent of social media as an alternative medium and strong influence of the young masses from the uprisings in the Arab countries in 2010-2011. This new way of consuming information is fed by young people, bloggers and journalists open to new technologies.

Among the subjects often studied by researchers is the question of development. The researcher emphasizes the role of the press, in the context of communication, to help in the processes of political development and media freedom of the countries concerned. The press is essentially strengthening its means of communication. Among the privileged subjects, one could find classifications of the press bodies according to their degree of freedom or allegiance to the political power in place as mentioned by William Rugh (1979), former diplomat and American ambassador to the Near Orient, in his book The Arab press: news media and political process in the Arab world. A second approach was followed, notably by Douglas Boyd (1982), an American communications researcher, who provides a historical analysis of the evolution of audiovisual in the Arab World and the conditions of its birth in his publication Broadcasting in the Arab word: a survey of radio and television in the Middle East or in Ami Ayalon (1995) The press in the Arab Middle East: a history.[2]

Another view is developing in the media in the Arab World from the 2000s to determine the changes in the television landscape in this region of the world. Jean-Philippe Bras and Larbi Chouikha (2002) wrote a book Médias et technologies de communication en Maghreb et en Méditerranée. Mondialisation, redéploiement et « art de faire » or Franck Mermier (2003) who coordinated a collective work entitled Mondialisation et nouveaux médias dans l’espace arabe. These two works make an observation on “the models of change of the television landscape” and the media in general in the context of globalization. These are works that place particular emphasis on the political, cultural and economic impact sought by the press among public opinion, as it is also advocated by the collective works directed by the German Kai Hafes (2001) Mass Media, Politics and Society in the Middle East and his 2008 work Arab Media: Power and Weakness. The commercial logic of profitability often took precedence over the role of development.

Nevertheless, when dealing with conflicts, the Arab press focuses on two other important subjects: geopolitics and international relations. This observation moves the media discourse away from the theme favored by media studies in the West (despite the possible links between the two).

The press is seen above all as the vehicle of its own values or for the interests of States. Based on this observation, the press plays a role other than information.

The analysis of the press, especially in the Arab world, leads the researcher to make the following observation: in addition to imposing old or new “cultural norms” the press often participates in consolidating the influence of the States to which it belongs. This strategy “participates in what is called « Public diplomacy »”.[3]

The fact remains that influence diplomacy is a fluid concept. Although we can remember that it promotes the interests of nations through information and participates in the influence that States want on the rest of the world and on world public opinion, it is obvious that this concept is closely linked to the plurality of actors and their objectives. This leads to the creation of various strategies on the part of the States and the media that represent them.

The media can also participate in the cultural, ideological, political and economical influence of non-state actors or actors not directly linked to the states. States in the Arab World and the Middle East generally do not use the media as a means of influence.

The media are thus considered as actors in international relations especially during conflicts where they are used as effective weapons.[4]

The main Arab press after Second World War was the Egyptian radio station Sawt al Arab (The voice of the Arabs) created in 1953, following the coup d’état against the monarchy and King Farouk and led by general Neguib and Colonel Abdel Nasser. It propagated the ideology of Arab nationalism and socialism.[5] Because of its anti-colonialist positions, it was bombed by France and Great Britain without ending its broadcast.

As a result of late 20th and early 21st century, political developments in the region, including the Gulf Wars of 1990 and 2003 and the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001, new geopolitical dynamics are pushing the states of the region to be more inventive in the media sector.

Several decades after Sawt al Arab, the Qatari television channel Al-Jazeera was created  in 1996 and is best known as the pan-Arab channel in the West. Although its main audience is Arabic-speaking population, the channel also broadcasts in English, Turkish and Serbo-Croatian. It adopts a hard editorial line against the Arab regimes and against the United States. Its strength was for a very long time to be the main transmitter of images and speeches emanating from multiple conflicts, particularly in Afghanistan and the Palestinian territories. This has earned it much criticism and hostility from several countries and political figures around the world, particularly the United States, which bombed its premises in Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, as well as in Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and Egypt. The channel obviously participates in the emancipation policy led by Qatar with regard to its neighbors, especially Saudi Arabia, in key issues in the region.

In response, the Saudi news channel Al-Arabiya (less known in the West than the previous one) was launched in 2003 with the aim of countering Al-Jazeera, which is very critical of the Saudi kingdom. It has a very critical editorial line with regard to Iran and its allies in the region, particularly in Syria and Iraq. Al-Arabiya also participates in the influence of Saudi Arabia and its political and ideological interests in the Middle East.

The two competing channels have a significant presence on the Internet via multiple information or educational websites in several languages.

Hundreds of other satellite news channels were created during the same period and for the same reasons. A large part is interested in national issues, but many remain oriented towards regional issues. Each brings a different ideological vision and serves the interests of States and regional and even international organizations. Some have independent editorial lines, but often ideologically oriented. In this case, they express the points of view of political opposition.

In the Arab world, the press in general, written (paper or digital format) and audiovisual, participates in the geopolitics of the media. Its plurality is “deployed in the Arab zone, each time by public operators”. Traditional actors, Arab and Western, have seen new actors enter the game: Russian, Chinese, Iranian, Japanese and Turkish.[6] Their objectives are always the same: to serve geopolitical interests, to restore their images or to create new ones. The commercial objective is not tenable according to Tourya Guaaybess, who considers that these are eminently political channels and not economically profitable. They are funded by States for non-commercial purposes. The fact remains that the public in Arab countries gives very little credit and does not follow foreign channels. It focuses more on news from transnational Arab channels.

The press can also adapt to the audience

While it is important to know that the press is a means of geopolitics for States, it is also important to integrate the notion of adaptation to the target audience.

Jeans Blaize Grize starts from the principle that “to hold a speech on a given theme, one must also have or make up a representation of the one to whom one is addressing, and to imagine the way in which he perceives and understands the subject treated”.[7] In other words, the media message is above all sent to already convinced readers, even activists. The right-wing reader will mostly read information from a right-wing media outlet. Meanwhile, the left-wing reader will favor left-leaning media outlets. In particular, it is possible to make a division within this perception of political spectrum between center-right, so-called classic right or extreme right, or even ultra-right. The same division can be applied to left-wing media.

According to Abdenbi Lachkar, the oriented political discourse sticks ideologically to that of the receiver, the target audience. Thus, it focuses on “the voluntary or involuntary use of representations”. The objective is not to justify the content of the speech, because the audience is already convinced. It emphasizes the ideological characteristics of discourse in complicity with media and social discourse. It “uses puns, lexical and lexicological ambiguities to mark the differences. To achieve its ends, it uses social differences without clarifying them, which constitutes a gap and an excess”.[8]

This “sociolinguistic treatment” leads to the construction of a “communicative model” whose meaning is understood according to the context (social, political and media) of the sender and the receiver.[9] Thus, the discourse ignores the notion of truth and social cohesion. Deepening the dissension at the scale of society makes it possible to federate. What is interesting in the expressions used happens to be the meaning given to them by the public, that is to say the representation, even if from the linguistic point of view they (the expressions) can remain vague. Thus, the transmitter is aimed at an audience that shares the same “ethos”, i.e the same way of being and of thinking about the world.

In line with what Abdenbi LAchkar suggests, Marie-Pierre Fourquet-Courbet and Didier Courbet believe that studies in communication sciences are interested in three aspects of media discourse. They focus on the aspect of production and media content, but invest less in the aspect of the reception of the discourse. That said, reception remains “fundamental”. From the point of view of theories of media communication, this “explains that the social meaning of media « message »” born of the interaction between a text, more generally a media device, and the social subjects of the public “receivers”, socially contextualized. The receiver is considered, “a co-producer of meaning”.[10] Still according to the two authors, “there is no longer any doubt today that a large number of media content (violent images, advertising, news, ideology underlying the broadcasts, etc.) form, reinforce or modify the representations, ideologies and social actions”.[11]

This perception of media topics risks being even more biased in the medium and long term. Research shows that the media act on “public space by emptying it of certain opinions, slowly modifying representations and social ideology ” (sociological approach).  It can also be biased because of different interpretations according to social groups (ethnographic approach).[12]

As the speech is intended for a targeted and convinced public, the question of objectivity and subjectivity becomes a privileged object of studies within the framework of communication strategies carried out by the press. The work thus explains “the way in which political discourse supported by the media influences individual and collective behavior as well as the reception of the discourse [where] the objectivity of some can be perceived as subjectivity by others. This dichotomous confusion thus becomes a communication strategy and contributes to the construction of representations. This calls into question both the language/speech/space relationship and that of the meaning and sociolinguistic inferences present in the discourse”.[13]

This is how the discourse goes beyond its discursive role to focus on the “way of acting, in and on society” and thus gives itself a pragmatic dimension in order to convince and federate through “the way of saying and « to act »”.[14]

 

Bibliography

Amossy, R. (2006). L’Argumentation dans le discours. Armand Colin.

Ayalon, A. (1995). The press in the Arab Middle East: a history. Oxford University Press.

Boyd, D. (1982). Broadcasting in the Arab word: a survey of radio and television in the Middle East. Temple University Press.

Boyd, D. (1965). The development of Egypt’s voice of the Arabs. In D. Brown (ed.), Issues in International Broadcasting. Broadcast Education Association.

Bras, J-P. and Chouikha, L. (2002). Médias et technologies de communication en Maghreb et en Méditerranée. Mondialisation, redéploiement et « art de faire ».  Institut de recherche sur le Maghreb contemporain.

Charaudeau, P. (2005). Discours politique : les masques du pouvoir. Vuibert.

Dayan, D. (2003). Sociologie des médias : le détour par l’ethnographie. In Moscovici, S. and Buschini, F. (ed.), Les méthodes des sciences humaines. Presses universitaires de France.

Fourquet-Courbet, M-P., et Courbet, D. (2009). Analyse de la réception des messages médiatiques, Récits rétrospectifs et verbalisations concomitantes, Communication et Langages, 9.

Fourquet-Courbet, M-P., et Courbet, D. (ed.) (2003). La Télévision et ses influences. De Boeck Université/INA.

Grize, J. B. (1990). Logique et langage. Ophris. p. 35, Quoted by Amossy, R. (2006). L’Argumentation dans le discours. Armand Colin.

Guaaybess, T. (2019). Les Médias dans les pays arabes, des théories du développement contrariées aux politiques de coopération émergentes. ISTE Éditions.

Hall, S. (1973). Encoding/Decoding TV discourse, CCCS, University of Birmingham.

Hammami, S. (2009). La communication publique dans le Monde arabe. Essai d’analyse de son émergence et de son développement, Communication et organisation, 35, 01/12/2012. http://journals.openedition.org/communicationorganisation/820

Kai, H. (ed.) (2001). Mass Media, Politics and Society in the Middle East. Hampton Press.

Kai, H. (ed.) (2008). Arab Media: Power and Weakness. Continuum International.

Lachkar, A. (2010). Discours politique, médias et représentations : quelle(s), stratégie(s) pour quel(s) effet(s). In M. Abecassis and G. Ledegen (ed.), Les Voix des Français volume 1 : à travers l’histoire, l’école et la presse. Peter Lang.

Laurens, H. (1993) L’Orient arabe : arabisme et islamisme de 1798 à 1945. Armand Colin.

Marchand, P. (ed.) (2004). Psychologie sociale des médias. Presses Universitaires de Rennes.

Mermier, F. (dir.) (2003). Mondialisation et nouveaux médias dans l’espace arabe. Maisonneuve et Larose.

Rugh, W. (1979). The Arab press: news media and political process in the Arab world. Syracuse University Press.

 

 Notes : 

[1] Guaaybess, T. (2019). Les Médias dans les pays arabes, des théories du développement contrariées aux politiques de coopération émergentes. ISTE Éditions. p. 13.

[2] Ibid., p. 14–15.

[3] About the diplomacy of influence in the Arab world, see in particular: Hammami, S. (2009). La communication publique dans le Monde arabe. Essai d’analyse de son émergence et de son développement, Communication et organisation, 35, 01/12/2012. http://journals.openedition.org/communicationorganisation/820

[4] See the evolution of the means granted by the colonial States between the two wars and by the Arab States after the independence which create radios in Arabic language intended for the Arab countries in order to influence them and to impose their strategic and ideological choices: Ibid., p.104-105; Laurens, H. (1993) L’Orient arabe : arabisme et islamisme de 1798 à 1945. Armand Colin. 331–332. The latter teaches us that the communication of the great powers between the two wars and during the Second World War was essential to federate the Arabs around it. The objective was to divert them from the enemy and use them against him.

[5] Boyd, D. (1965). The development of Egypt’s voice of the Arabs. In D. Brown (ed.), Issues in International Broadcasting. Broadcast Education Association. Quoted by Guaaybess, T. (2019). Op. Cit. p. 105.

[6] Guaaybess, T. (2019). Op. Cit. 106–107.

[7] Grize, J. B. (1990). Logique et langage. Ophris. p. 35, Quoted by Amossy, R. (2006). L’Argumentation dans le discours. Armand Colin. p. 43.

[8] Lachkar, A. (2010). Discours politique, médias et représentations : quelle(s), stratégie(s) pour quel(s) effet(s). In M. Abecassis and G. Ledegen (ed.), Les Voix des Français volume 1 : à travers l’histoire, l’école et la presse. Peter Lang.

[9] Charaudeau, P. (2005). Discours politique : les masques du pouvoir. Vuibert. Quoted by Lachkar, A. (2010). Op. Cit

[10] Hall, S. (1973). Encoding/Decoding TV discourse, CCCS, University of Birmingham. Quoted by Fourquet-Courbet, M-P., et Courbet, D. (2009). Analyse de la réception des messages médiatiques, Récits rétrospectifs et verbalisations concomitantes, Communication et Langages, 9.

[11] Marchand, P. (ed.) (2004). Psychologie sociale des médias. Presses Universitaires de Rennes; Fourquet-Courbet, M-P., et Courbet, D. (ed.) (2003). La Télévision et ses influences. De Boeck Université/INA. Quoted by par Fourquet-Courbet, M-P., et Courbet, D. (2009). Op. Cit.

[12] Dayan, D. (2003). Sociologie des médias : le détour par l’ethnographie. In Moscovici, S. and Buschini, F. (ed.), Les méthodes des sciences humaines. Presses universitaires de France. Quoted by par Fourquet-Courbet, M-P., et Courbet, D. (2009). Op. Cit.

[13] Charaudeau, P. (2005). Op. cit.

[14] Ibid.

Biography : 

Boualem FARDJAOUI is a teacher-researcher at the University of Lille (France). He is an associate researcher at the CECILLE research laboratory (Center for Studies in Civilizations, Languages and Foreign Letters). His research focuses on the geopolitics of the Arab world and the Middle East and on the media discourse. He co-edited : Fardjaoui, B. and Eppreh-Butet, R. (ed.) (2017). Les États-Unis au Maghreb et au Moyen-Orient : l’évolution de la politique américaine sous le gouvernement Obama. Éditions du Conseil scientifique de l’université de Lille3 UL3. He wrote : Fardjaoui, B. (2017). Le conflit à Gaza de 2008-2009 dans le discours médiatique ; quand la guerre devient une affaire de géopolitique mondiale (L’Harmattan, collection « Comprendre le Moyen-Orient », Paris, 2017) ; Fardjaoui, B. (2023). De Obama à Trump : le discours de la presse écrite dans le monde arabe en transformation. Entre enjeux militants et intérêts d’État. L’Harmattan ; Fardjaoui, B. (2017). Méthode d’analyse du contenu de la presse écrite pour les chercheurs débutants : Méthode d’analyse de la fréquence. Edilivre.