Televising Revolution in the Middle East

The Bush Administration has been trying to democratize the Middle East by way of the ballot box, but a Nielsen box might be the better way to go.

Somewhere on the TV dial between the Arabic version of "Deal or No Deal" and the Al Zawraa Iraqi insurgent channel, the seeds of a paradigm shift lurk. Television in the Middle East is in the midst of a transformation.

Thriving Arab satellite networks are breaking down walls between countries and cultures and allowing divergent values to compete in the most public of arenas. And a new wave of private broadcasters is discovering an audience for Western-style decadence.

In many ways, it's a capitalist dream come true -- television as free market movement, commoditizing ideas and transforming cultural values into cold, hard cash. But as any television fan will tell you, it's the surprise twist at the end that brings you to the water cooler.

And this is a story with a classic twist. The most powerful force leading Arab television in a march toward Western-style values is Syria -- one of the Bush Administration's most hated foes.

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Americans might be surprised at how closely television in the Middle East already resembles what's playing in Peoria.

"The American myth about the Arab world and media is that Arabs go to bed at night hating America, they get up in the morning hating Israel, and they watch al-Jazeera in between," says James Zogby, the president of the Arab American Institute, in Washington, D.C.

Zogby hosts a talk show on Abu Dhabi TV, one of a new breed of satellite channels with a regional reach. "It's just like here, a very mixed bag of programming," he says.

The Middle East and North African market encompasses several distinct cultures and political styles, and includes sharp differences in religion and morality. But most countries share the Arabic language, and the rise of satellite TV has created a truly regional market for the first time.

Although some shows are received differently from country to country, many hits stretch across the area. Game shows are consistent performers, no matter where one lives. Despite fatwas condemning it as gambling, the Arabic version of "Who Wants to Be A Millionaire?" is a smash hit for the Saudi-run Middle East Broadcasting Centre (MBC), a satellite channel broadcasting from Dubai. "Deal or No Deal," produced by the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation, enjoys similar success.

But reality programs are what's really hot. "Star Academy," the Arabic version of "American Idol," draws big numbers for LBC, which produces many of the top hits in the reality-game space. "Al Wadi" (The Farm) is another LBC hit.

Click here to see a clip of Star Academy 

Based on a European reality show by the same name, "The Farm" is hosted by a sequin-studded Lebanese singer, Haifa Wehbe, a star of unlikely proportions (both cultural and anatomical).

It's basically "Survivor" on a farm, with celebrity contestants who are tested on their ability to perform random acts of agriculture such as baling hay and milking cows. Each show ends with a spectacular set piece and song by the outrageously dressed Wehbe, who would not look out of place at a Las Vegas revue.

Click here to see a clip of The Farm

After each episode, one contestant is eliminated by an unfettered popular vote via telephone -- a unaccustomed taste of democracy that has not gone unnoticed. A prominent Saudi cleric touched off an international stir by declaring reality TV a Western "weapon of mass destruction." Viewers have not been deterred.

"The youth market is beginning to fuel TV for the first time," says Janet Fine, who covers Middle Eastern television for Variety. Although shows like "Star Academy" and "Al Wadi" are dominant hits, the focus on youth doesn't always mean skin, secularism, and frivolty.

"Green Light," produced out of Dubai in 2005, challenged a team of four young people to perform sundry works of charity. "The Path of the Message," a 2006 production out of Cairo, sent a group of young participants on a global road trip with a "history of Islam" theme.

Superstar Islamic televangelist Amr Khaled scored a mega-hit with "Life Makers," which aimed to spark an Islamic revival among people of all ages, with a series of socially conscious projects such as urging viewers to launch a letter-writing campaign against smoking. Another of his initiatives aimed to persuade advertisers not to "use the woman's body to promote products."

But despite Khaled's best efforts, sex continues to sell -- even during the holy month of Ramadan.

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Reality is the flavor of the month, but you can see the really interesting changes in the tried and true format of the soap opera. The biggest and most daring soaps air during Ramadan, the center of the TV universe. After the traditional fast-breaking dinner each night at sunset, televisions all over the Middle East click to life.

"Whether you're fasting or not fasting, it's the time, it's the sweeps week, and that's when the best television is on," says Marlin Dick, a former editor at the Daily Star newspaper in Beirut, who now writes about television for a journal published by the Adham Center for Electronic Journalism at The American University in Cairo.

The highest-profile Ramadan programs are presented in a serial format known as the musalsal. Most musalsalat are soap operas, typically telling a single, complete story in half-hour installments over 15 to 30 nights.

Click here for a clip from a musalsal. 

Musalsalat can be ponderous historical epics, political allegories, comedies, conspiracy thrillers, or melodramatic tales of love, sin, and murder. The majority are simple entertainment, but in recent years, some of the most popular shows have begun tackling major issues of the day.

"There's a critical mass, like Hollywood," Dick says. "There are 10 percent that are pretty interesting, but the other 90 percent are just commercial and entertainment and not that relevant."

However, that 10 percent counts. Socially relevant dramas, covering everything from terrorism to corruption to crime, did extremely well in the 2006 Ramadan season, Fine says.

"You will probably see these social dramas more and more," she added. Some of the issues, including unwed mothers and homosexuality, are pushing hard against Islamic values, she says, although the "bad girl" usually meets with a bad end.

In the past, the state-owned media monopolies in the Middle East gave little leeway to writers and directors who wanted to challenge, or even closely examine, the status quo. That began to change in the 1980s, according to Dick, when Syria started allowing private production companies to film there.

Of course, Syria isn't exactly a poster child for civil rights and open society. The government censors the Internet and newspapers. Bloggers critical of the regime are occasionally hauled in for friendly chats with the secret police. Just a few years ago, a woman was jailed for forwarding a scatological e-mail about President Bashar al-Asad.

On the other hand, "It ain't North Korea, or Saddam-era Iraq," says Dick. The financial rewards have spurred a loosening of standards, he explains, but there are still "red lines" that producers dare not cross. For instance, it's fine to attack corrupt regimes all over the Middle East, but unwise to critique the government of Syria.

In other countries, similar double-standards apply. When you put all of these limited viewpoints together into a growing regional pool of satellite channels, the net result is not exactly free expression, but it's certainly progress, and Syriais leading the charge. They're "doing very well and beating everybody out," Fine says.

An example is the 2005 musalsal "Behind Bars," a classic soap about families torn apart. A father is imprisoned and his children suffer travails that would be familiar to most American soap fans -- bad marriages, petty crime, drugs, heavy drinking, prostitution, and eventually murder. Controversial story elements included date rape, a Christian-Muslim love story, and implied masturbation, according to Dick.

Musalsalat have also tackled hot issues such as government corruption, terrorism, and religious extremism. In 2005, MBC produced "The Beautiful Maidens," an hourlong, 30-part Ramadan serial written with the input of a former al Qaeda member. An anti-terror polemic, it traces the impact of extremism on Arab families living in Saudi Arabia. The title refers to the 72 virgins that terrorist "martyrs" expect to meet in paradise.

Another controversial hit is the Saudi sketch comedy "Tash Ma Tash," which lampoons fundamentalism and the Wahhabi religious police. The name approximates to "Que Sera Sera" (sort of).

"In Saudi Arabia, 'Tash Ma Tash' is part of the political struggle" among the competing factions, says Yigal Carmon, president of the Middle East Media Research Institute. MEMRI translates clips from Arab television into English and posts them online, at memritv.org.

Click here for scenes from Tash Ma Tash 

"You have several princes in the establishment, liberals, fighting very sincerely to introduce more liberal concepts," Carmon says. "And they support this show." But liberals can only do so much.

What viewership numbers are available suggest "Tash" is a smash hit in Saudi Arabia, but not elsewhere. "Arab countries really aren't ready for Saudi humor," Dick says.

It isn't all about mounting liberalism. According to Carmon, Iranian television produces a raft of musalsalat peddling strange variants of Islamic eschatology and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.

One such program dramatized an urban legend about Jews stealing the eyes of Palestinian children for use in transplants. Another recent conspiracy thriller was based on the premise that the Holocaust never happened. One ambitious "documentary" set out to validate the discredited Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Carmon, a former Israeli intelligence officer, says the programs are "high-level" productions and admitted he was impressed by the storytelling. 

Click here for a clip from an Iranian musalsal

Regardless, Iranian musalsalat haven't caught on with the broader audience, even when translated into Arabic from their original Farsi. The shows don't air on the most popular channels, says Dick; only the "really hard-core soap opera addicts" follow them.

For decades, Egypt dominated the musalsal genre, but the Syrian productions are now what's cool and new. Egyptian shows now tend to rely on star power rather than aiming for the cutting-edge, Dick says. In large part, that's because Egypt's television industry is still dominated by the state.

"You have a guaranteed audience, guaranteed buyers in the form of Egyptian satellite channels that are state-owned," says Dick. "There's not that much pressure to take chances."

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Although the spread of satellite television is causing an explosion of content, one critical component remains missing: A mechanism for measuring viewers clearly and objectively on a regionwide basis.

"There are a few research agencies that offer basic information about the viewership volume and segmentation across the Middle East; however such analyses remain a rough estimate," according to Alberto Chahoud, managing director of Ace Worldwide, an advertising agency and media buyer based in Dubai. 

It's the nitty-gritty Nielsen spreadsheets that fine-tune programming decisions in the U.S. market; cold hard numbers are not inclined to change to accommodate buyers cultural preconceptions. While the Nielsen system has its share of critics, it's unquestionably far better than the mass of semi-random surveys that currently gauge Middle Eastern viewership.

"What you have are basically some marketing groups who pass themselves off as pollsters, who will, in effect, tell the networks what they want to hear," says James Zogby.

Many established players are perfectly happy to remain with the status quo, but some in the region are already talking about instituting automated and real-time measurement techniques, Chaoud said.

The soaring value of the regional television market makes it virtually inevitable that better measurement systems will be implemented, sooner or later.

Industry analysts expect cable and satellite reception in the Middle East and North Africa to reach more than 40 million homes -- about two thirds of all televisions -- by 2010, according to Janet Fine.

Advertising revenues are expected to climb from about $2 billion to $3 billion during that time. In Dubai, the government built a tax-free zone and industrial park known as Media City, which has become a bustling hub for semi-independent and fully private broadcasters to produce their wares. Last year, Syria launched its own version of Media City in Damascus.

The more money that flows, the greater the pressure for scientific measurement. When the Nielsen boxes finally arrive, they will almost certainly change the Middle East forever. An anonymous, transnational aggregate of viewers can do a lot more than vote contestants off "The Farm." A mass of viewers, voting via remote control, can't be rounded up and held accountable for its collective taste.  

The biggest fly in the ointment, ironically, is the threat of an expanded regional war, even one idealistically intended to "promote freedom."

Syria may not be an attractive political partner, but the programming emerging from its borders is doing more to Westernize the Middle East than all the carrots and sticks the diplomatic process can offer. Conversely, a war involving Israel could create a much more receptive audience for Iran's anti-Semitic conspiracy fare.  

In the end, the wise choice might be to just let the revolution be televised after all.

J.M. Berger is editor of INTELWIRE.com.