MediaAcT

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Media landscapes in transition:
Perspectives from the Arab world
By JudiTh pieS & AMirOuche nedJAA
A taxi journey in Amman can introduce
you to the challenges and chances of media
accountability in Jordan and other
transitional Arab countries. Assume you
are traveling with Mohammed Abu Safieh,
a taxi driver and chairman of Balad
Radio’s listeners’ club. Balad Radio is the
first community radio station in Jordan. It
wants to include the audience in its daily
work and the listeners’ club is part of how
Balad Radio aims to do that. Originally,
Mr. Abu Safieh’s task was to collect listeners’
complaints and ideas and pass them
on to the journalists in the newsroom who
would then use them to improve their performance.
In reality, his job has become Photograph: Imago/Xihua
much more complex: journalists in the
newsrooms don’t necessarily want taxi drivers
to interfere in their work; citizens contributing to news gathering expression “phone calls from the mukhabarat” almost interchangeably
don’t reveal their sources to the radio staff; the mukhabarat (the secret with “soft containment”.
service) wants to make sure that Balad Radio is not too critical of the In Tunisia, any criticism of the government or the president was
local head of police.
subject to systematic censorship until the end of the Ben Ali regime in
While driving his taxi through Amman, Mohammed Abu Safieh 2011. The Tunisian Internet Agency, which was controlled by the go-
receives phone calls from officials, citizens and journalists. His five vernment, imposed heavy content filtering. Oppositional and regime
years of experience working with the listeners’ club has equipped him critical websites were blocked and even media outlets operating from
with the necessary tools to moderate between the differing claims: “The abroad, like Radio Kalima, were hacked. Journalists were constantly in
club has helped me to understand decision making mechanisms by the fear of being imprisoned. Even though a lot of reform initiatives have
state, members of parliament and media outlets. It has also helped me taken place since the revolution (see infobox), pressure from politicians,
to understand how credible or transparent they all are.” His represen- judges, media owners and security services remain. One example is the
tative role as chairman of the listeners’ club has shifted to a mediating arrest of Attounissia newspaper journalists for publishing a photograph
position, and the challenge is to answer some of the basic questions for showing the German-Tunisian football player Sami Khedira hugging
journalism in Jordan and other countries in transition: how can journa- a naked top model.
lism become more independent of regimes? Can audience involvement Long standing practices of control and pressure do not change within a
make journalism more responsible towards the needs of society? How few years and journalists need to learn to live up to their new freedoms
much transparency is needed to evaluate the quality and independence and growth in independence. In theory, journalists strongly reject “soft
of journalists’ work?
containment” and state interference, but how can they get rid of it in
practice?
Regimes still hold journalists to account
A big challenge is the remaining impact of the regime’s various means
for directing journalists to act in the regime’s own interest. In Jordan,
censorship was banned from print journalism in 1989, when martial
law was also lifted. However, direct content control through radio and
TV licensing procedures, and less explicit forms of control, so-called
“soft containment”, are still present. Politicians, businessmen, religious
leaders and others, who want to influence journalists’ reporting, threaten
journalists with prison or offer them money. In a survey by the Jordanian
Al-Quds Research Center, 43% of the Jordanian journalists surveyed
said that they had been exposed to such attempts, mostly because
they were reporting on security issues. So, journalists in Jordan use the
Journalists are skeptical about self-regulation
Journalistic codes of ethics are the oldest form of journalistic self-regulation
and have been adopted in countries all over the world. However,
many authoritarian regimes have misused them, using them as another
means of state control. In the case of Jordan, the code of ethics, issued
by the Jordanian Press Association in 2003, became a legally binding part
of the press and publications law, completely contradicting the idea of
voluntary and independent journalistic self-regulation. This cynically
explains why, in the MediaAcT survey, Jordanian journalists consider
codes of ethics as highly influential for their journalistic performance.
In many European countries, professional organisations have been