GEETAM 2004 MODULES

rational and inclusive public argumentation supersedes status and tradition in defining the public interest and driving political action,
recent research has tended to focus on questions about access, and about boundaries between public and private or between secular
and religious discourse. For mare lynch, in is recent work on pan-arab television talk shows, a public sphere consists of routine,
ongoing, unscripted arguments before a participating audience about issues relevant to many for dyala hamzah, focusing on egyptian
media, the existence of layers of public discourse that never intersect with each other leads to the conclusion that arab public opinion,
and thus an arab transnational public sphere, are absent. For armando salvatore and mark levine, a central problem is that the idea of
the public is culturally embedded they revert to the discourse of the common good whose long genealogy cuts across east west divides,
seeing this as the guiding approach for a broad, transcultural understanding of the public sphere as the communicative and legitimizing
basis of potentially democratic political systems an important aspect of public sphere theory that has so far tended to receive less
attention in research on arab media is regulation. This is puzzling since, as nicholas garnham has pointed out, part of the attraction of
the public sphere approach lies in its stress on the necessary institutional foundations for the realisation of citizen rights to free
expression and debate it addresses the problem of constructing the institutions and practices of democracy at the level of both state and
civil society in countries where these have been eroded or are lacking. Oliver hahn, in the chapter immediately following this
introduction, takes account of how institutions affect transcultural communication. He draws on research into changes in
communicative space across eastern and western europe to assess how the concept of the public sphere may help as a tool for analyzing
developments not only in arab media but in arab european exchanges in times of crisis. On the way, he the significance of the journalist
s potential role as interpreter and the dominant influence of wider political systems and relations of power on the functioning of the
media as intermediaries for public communication. Both reminders serve well when we consider changes in media regulation in some
arab countries, including those under foreign occupation, and their impact on the security of journalists. The hazards of journalism
have been underlined by events in iraq, where reuters reported more than journalists killed in three years after the us-led invasion,
with many more injured or detained without trial. Jail sentences for journalists continued in Egypt into despite earlier presidential
promises to end them. A new press law in kuwait in imposed jail sentences for religious offences and fines for criticizing the ruler. In
morocco, at the same time as licences were being issued for new private broadcasters in spring independent print media were
struggling to survive in the face of step fines. The list of the contradictions could go on. As to the political configurations that produce
them, and the strategies media entities and citizens adopt to overcome them, a range of thoughtful insights are contained in this book.
The internet, have been presented as promoters of a public sphere. A growing body of academic literature on al-jazeera likewise refers
to theories of the public sphere. Such a conceptualization maintains that, alongside ongoing structural change in the global media
market, cultures of arab news journalism on satellite television are also playing a part in the emergence of a single or multiple public
sphere s in the arab world. It also presupposes that j rgen habermas s concept of the public sphere is applicable, or directly
transferable, to the authoritarian politics of the arab world. To assess whether this supposition is correct, it is important to reexamine
both the concept itself and the way it has been used in european research, including research conducted in indian the original language
in which habermas wrote about the public sphere and in other languages. This chapter begins by considering three different
conceptualisations of the public sphere that are discernible in research into the notion of a transnational european public sphere or
spheres, abbreviated her to ep s s in line with existing uk research on the subject. It goes on to look more closely at developments in
arab news journalism to discover whether, or how far, any of these conceptualisations can be applied transculturally to encompass
media developments in the arab region as well as in europe. It ends by drawing conclusions about the application of theories of the
public sphere to transnational structural changes in the arab and global media landscapes. Glocalisation and public sphere theory
television news companies that operate globally in both the west and the arab world seek to conquer new markets and acquire new
audiences beyond the boundaries of their own cultural and linguistic spaces. To this end they embark on a management strategy of
programme adaption captured in the term glocalization this neologism, although combining two seeming opposites, globalisation and
localisation is only superficially contradictory. It is in fact translated from the korean word dochaduka, meaning global localisation
roland robertson defines glocalisation as a term which was developed in particular to marketing issues, as japan became more
concerned with and successful in the global economy, against the background of much experience with the general problem of the
relationship between the universal and the particular. In order to maintain a dominant presence in world media, certain television
news stations have opted for a policy of glocalisation, whereby they disseminate content in other languages besides that of their home
base. Bbc world, cnn international and al-jazeera have all followed this strategy. Bbc world has operated an arabic-language website
since which it revamped in and cnn has done likewise since aljazeera added an english-language website to its existing arabic-language
website in as already noted, al-jazeera english started in in october the bbc decided to introduce an arabic-language satellite tv news
channel starting in to be based in london with an operating cost of £ million a year. This was not the bbc s first entry into the market
for arabic-language television news. Between and it produced such a service under contract with the satellites broadcasting platform
orbit television and radio network in rome, financed by the saudi arabian investor mawarid group. Following dispute between the
british broadcaster and the arab financier over editorial independence, bbc arabic tv was shut down and many of its journalists moved
to qatar, in order to help build up al-jazeera, launched in according to several arab media commentators, including on aljazeera, the
planned new bbc arabic tv runs the risk of being considered a copy of al-hurra, the arabic-language satellite tv news channel financed
by the us state department, which started in february from a base in springfield, virginia. But al-hurra was not the only other western
television station to broadcast in arabic by this stage. Indiany s international broadcaster deutsche welled w baded in bonn and berlin,
started arabic subtitling of its programming in and moved to broadcasting three hours per day of television news programming in
arabic in February arabic was also one of six plot languages for dw websites from the beginning of whereas bbc world service radio
included arabic from dw had followed suit in choosing arabic as the first non-european language for its radio broadcasts. Nearly half a
century later dw s arabic radio service was on air for five hours a day. In light of us, british and indian funding for arabic-language
broadcasting, it should also be noted that French plans for a tv project, under the name france envisaged arabic as potentially one of the
new channel s languages, alongside french, english and spanish. Dubbed cnn ala francaise by observers, france was planned to involve
a joint venture between france s national commercial television channel tf which runs its won frech-language satellite news channel,
la chaine info and the public service broadcasting group france televisions. Initiated by the french president, jacques chirac, and
approved by the european commission in brussels in june as not contravening european union rules on state aid, france was given
euros million on french government funding for and another euros million for projects such as these assume that a certain level of
transcultural communication and cooperation is possible. One example of such cooperation exists in arse, the cultural television
channel formed through franco-indian collaboration. Arte represents a joint cross-border effort based on parity of input from both

CONFIDENTIAL 245