The Kingdom and the Power

Every day millions of people across the Arab world tune in to television news shows produced not in Damascus or Cairo, but in a white-domed multimillion-dollar studio that sits mirage-like behind high fences and security gates in a red-brick neighborhood in London. Just five years old, Middle East Broadcasting Centre, or MBC, has become a veritable Arab-world CNN, a channel thoroughly western in style that reaches millions of viewers.

The Arab world does not boast mass-circulation newspapers, but Arabs love television. Satellite dish sales in Morocco now top those in the United Kingdom. Viewers from Riyadh to Casablanca, from lonely West Bank villages to living rooms in Dubai, especially like MBC and a handful of other pan-Arab channels that have sprung up recently. All are Saudi-owned, and all are sleek and professional. They particularly shine in comparison with the clunky state-owned Arab stations that mostly crank out airy news and images of smiling leaders in plush palaces. But while they look like western-style free-press operations, the Saudi-owned channels are something else; to some Arabs, in fact, they are something to worry about.

 Directly or indirectly, these critics say, the Saudis already control much of Arab print journalism, and now are moving to control TV. These Arabs fear that Saudi Arabia's media moguls have acquired the potential to reflect a vast world of some 200 million Arabs in their own limited image: conservative, male-dominated, and very resistant to change. And news that would discomfit the Saudi royal family is unlikely to be aired.

 As the Syrian poet Nizzar Kabbany wrote in a fiercely anti-Saudi poem about the media, "No one wants to take away your happy monarch/No one wants to steal your khalifa's headband/ So drink the oil wine to its end/And leave culture to us." The poem is called "Father of Ignorance Buys Fleet Street."

Before the Saudis emerged, the Iraqis, Egyptians, Palestinians, and Libyans played major roles in the Arab media. But as their wealth and influence waned, so did the impact of each of these players.

 Saudi influence has grown, meanwhile, and unlike those other countries, the kingdom has staked out a major role in the visual media. According to industry experts in London and elsewhere, the Saudi-owned pan-Arab channels have yet to earn any money. But most of the owners of these channels have deep pockets. And most are related to Saudi Arabia's royal family:

 • MBC is part of ARA Group International, a media conglomerate that includes the once American-owned UPI, an FM station in Saudi Arabia broadcast in the gulf and beamed worldwide by satellite, a Saudi cable company, a media production company in Cairo, and Arabic Network of America, a radio and television company based in Washington, D.C. MBC and ARA's chairman is Sheikh Walid Ali Ibrahim, a brother-in-law of Saudi Arabia's King Fahd.

 • Orbit Communications, a three-year-old multichannel pay television service broadcast widely throughout the Middle East and North Africa from Rome, is owned by Prince Fahd Bin Khalid Bin Abdullah Bin Abdulrahman Al Saud, who is also a relative of the king.

 • Arab Radio and Television (ART), a three-year-old entertainment-oriented channel based in Cairo that reaches most of the Middle East and North Africa, is led by Sheikh Saleh Kamel, a wealthy Saudi businessman, and Prince Al-Waleed Bin Talal Abulaziz Al-Saud, a thirty-nine-year-old nephew of King Fahd. The prince's business acumen and success have become almost mythic; with worldwide holdings reportedly worth $10 billion, he is one of the largest shareholders in Citicorp in the U.S., and in Euro Disney. In March he announced a joint entertainment venture with the pop star Michael Jackson that would emphasize "family values."

 Fear and loathing of the Saudis is hardly new in the Arab world. Since their petrodollars gave them the clout to shape the Middle East's destiny, the Saudis have commonly been accused by Arab journalists from other countries of buying up news outlets so they can create an "immune system."

 For example, after seventy-three-year-old King Fahd suffered a stroke last November, Arab journalists say, there were few details in the Saudi-owned news media about his health, or the likely competition within the royal family for a successor.

Nor, they add, did the Saudi press pick up on western reports this past summer that the Saudis refused to let U.S. investigators question four Saudis before they were executed in May for the November 1995 car-bombing at a military training site in Riyadh. Seven people, five of them Americans, lost their lives in the attack.

 MBC News editor Pierre Ghanem says the American news reports about security requests could not be confirmed. And he concedes there are stories to avoid. "I cannot deny," he says, "that Mohammed al-Mas'sari is a subject to be careful of. You don't see him broadly covered here."

 For a regime unaccustomed to opposition, Mas'sari is the Saudis' arch- demon. The forty-nine-year-old physicist, who hopes to peaceably replace the Saudi government one day, was held in prison for his role in underground political activities before fleeing to Britain in 1994. With other Islamic dissidents in London, he set up a fax and telephone information center, as well as a sophisticated Web site, that has bombarded Saudi Arabia with accusations about the government and ruling family.

Fearful of losing lucrative military contracts with the Saudis, British officials sought to deport Mas'sari in January. But an immigration appeals judge blocked the move, saying Mas'sari's life might be endangered.

Mas'sari is not MBC's only sensitive topic. MBC news staff members quietly recall pressure not to air criticism of Arab countries friendly to Saudi Arabia. This has eased up lately, they say, although stories about Islam, the Saudi royal family, or the government are still considered very sensitive.

Edwin Hart, MBC's news director, a veteran American broadcaster who was an official with Knight-Ridder's television operations, concedes that his staff, which includes Arabs from many countries, must be careful about Middle Eastern "sensitivities."

 But he insists there are fewer taboos than expected, and boasts of an unbiased approach to the news. He also points to the fact that one of his major bureaus is in Jerusalem — a situation once considered impossible for a Saudi-owned operation.

 Such claims do not dissuade Abdel Barri Atwan, a Palestinian journalist and a former managing editor at the London-based daily Asharq al-Awsat, who is a relentless critic of the impact of the "Saudi media empire." He edits Al-Quds al- Arabi, a struggling pan-Arab newspaper published in London that is banned in many Arab countries, including Saudi Arabia. His criticism has led to Saudi claims that his newspaper is financed by the PLO, although Atwan denies this.

 In any event, Atwan credits the Saudis with bringing new technology to the Arab media, and creating hundreds of jobs. But he also accuses them of nurturing a "a one-sided intellectual and professional" way of thinking that leans heavily on self-censorship and encourages a narrow view of the world.

 An incident earlier this year offers a clear example of the clash between Saudi and Western news values. It also supports Atwan's claims that the Saudis cannot relinquish their penchant for censorship in the face of critical reports.

 The occasion was the break-up of the ten-year, $150-million contract signed in 1994 between the BBC and Orbit, the three-year-old pay-TV service. When Orbit declared the deal dead, it claimed that it had made "many attempts to persuade the BBC to be more sensitive" to Islamic issues. The BBC, meanwhile, clearly paid a price for the split-up, having assembled a costly 200-strong workforce capable of producing Arabic-language television programs.

 As part of a settlement, both sides agreed not to offer details about their dispute. But the outlines are known: for one thing, the BBC had received reports that Orbit was interrupting the uplink transmission of several programs, or substituting other programs for controversial ones, according to people close to the London-based effort. Orbit officials in Rome say such programs were not censored. The BBC maintains that they were.

The falling-out followed the airing of a BBC broadcast last April called "Death of a Principle." The title was a play on words on a 1980 British production, "Death of a Princess," which raised a storm in Saudi Arabia because it depicted the execution of an adulterous young princess and her lover. The Saudis considered that movie an invasion of royal family privacy and a national insult.

Last April's broadcast, put together by BBC for its Panorama program, and not by the BBC's Arabic service, raised questions about the state of human rights in Saudi Arabia, the effort to deport Mas'sari, and the British government's willingness to ignore abuses there to protect its trade ties with the Saudis. The program, which was first broadcast domestically and later in the Arab world, included clandestine footage of the preparation for a double beheading, and interviews with foreign workers who claimed their rights had been violated in Saudi Arabia.

The heads of the BBC's Arabic Television service expected repercussions from their already angry partner and got them. "This program was a sneering and racist attack on Islamic law and culture," declared Alexander B. Zilo, Orbit's president and c.e.o., in a statement issued at the time.

 If the BBC-Orbit experience was a disaster, MBC officials view their partnership with the Voice of America as just the opposite: a badge of their credibility. But some in the VOA strongly disagree.

The official position is upbeat, highlighting some of the advantages the VOA has gained from the arrangement, which began in January. The two entities are co-producing a one-hour news and discussion program, "Dialogue with the West." For the VOA, the partnership has meant greater exposure in a part of the world where it has had a limited audience because of less- than-desirable transmitter facilities.

 It is also the first time that the fifty-four-year-old government agency, which prides itself on the uncensored and unbiased news it broadcasts to the world, has co-produced a regularly scheduled television show with a private broadcast company. This is a commercial route that the agency would like to follow.

 "From the beginning I was a skeptic about it," says VOA director Geoffrey Cowan. (In January, Cowan is to become dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California.) He was worried, he recalls, that the program would avoid sensitive guests and topics. That is no longer a concern, he says. As examples of the show's ability to break taboos, he notes that not only has the program dealt with the roles of Middle Eastern women, but that Israel's U.S. ambassador has been on as well.

 Within the VOA, however, "Dialogue" can be a sore subject.

 Nearly forty VOA staffers signed a petition in February seeking the cancellation of the partnership with MBC. Some staffers were miffed that the MBC news program, on January 5, had avoided mention of the British effort on that very day to deport Mas'sari.

 Cowan, who met with VOA workers to discuss the program, is convinced that the meeting proved that many of the staffers' criticisms were "patently false." But some staffers remain dubious about the relationship. "It isn't appropriate for the VOA to be in a joint agreement with MBC," says Kim Elliott, a VOA broadcaster and long-term employee. The VOA's credibility, Elliott says, should not be risked.

 MBC officials are upbeat about the prospects of turning a profit within a few months. One reason for their optimism is the introduction of a multi-channel cable TV service in Saudi Arabia. As a satellite station, MBC relies largely on sponsorships and advertisements for revenues. But as a pay-for-service operation, it can tap the lucrative Saudi consumer market.

 The shift to a cable system might resolve another problem for Saudi officials: the spread of satellite dishes and what they have brought to the once-isolated desert kingdom. With nearly 200,000 dishes receiving foreign broadcasts, the government in 1992 banned any more from entering the country, heeding religious leaders' complaints about foreign influence. It blocked the installation of any new dishes in 1994. Western diplomats and others say the government has not cracked down so far on the use of the existing dishes.

 With the introduction of cable, however, the government is expected to clamp down on satellite dishes in Saudi Arabia, closing off viewers from the rest of the video world.

 Yet in much of the rest of the Arab world, the genie is out of the bottle. Those with dishes will have many stations to choose from, including TV from a world they might never otherwise encounter.

 That is certainly true for Jadalla Awad, thirty, who owns a small construction business in At Tirah, a dusty mountaintop village in the West Bank. He rarely reads a newspaper, but regularly is glued to his television, watching some of the more than 100 channels picked up by the large dish atop his three-story stone house.

 Awad is a satisfied MBC customer, particularly when he compares it to state-owned Arab stations. "They don't just give the good news the government wants and play old movies like the other Arab stations," he says. "They show you all the things you hear about."

Yet his viewing tastes are much broader, he brags, as he clicks from one station to another, from all over the world, including the U.S. Also, Hungary: "I get stations from countries I never heard of before," he says.

 Just as he is fascinated with the vast viewing capabilities, so are his neighbors, who fill every available spot nightly on his large balcony as they sit watching the television and the world beyond

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