The Media Economics and Cultural Politics of Al Jazeera English in the United States
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THE MEDIA ECONOMICS AND CULTURAL POLITICS OF AL JAZEERA ENGLISH IN THE UNITED STATES by William Lafi Youmans A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Communication Studies) in the University of Michigan 2012 Doctoral Committee: Professor W. Russell Neuman, Co-Chair Professor Gerald P. Scannell, Co-Chair Professor Andrew J. Shryock Assistant Professor Aswin Punathambekar TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF CHARTS iv CHAPTERS 1. Introduction 1 Introduction 1 Theoretical Background 4 Framework, Format, Chapters, and Methods 11 2. Al Jazeera English’s Origins, Content and Identity 34 Al Jazeera's Origins 37 The Impetus for the English Channel 44 The United States and Al Jazeera 75 Conclusion 84 3. The Problems and Prospects of Accessing American Televisions 86 The Challenge of the American TV Market 88 The Challenge of American Political Culture 126 Conclusion 140 4. The Debate Over Al Jazeera, English in Burlington, VT 143 Introduction 143 Burlington, VT and Burlington Telecom 144 How AJE Gained carriage in Burlington 150 The Debate Over AJE 151 Applying the Framework 181 ii 5. Al Jazeera’s Moment? Elite Discourse, Public Sentiments and Distribution 187 Introduction 187 Reporting Revolution 193 U.S. Elite Discourse Before and After Egypt 212 The American Public and Al Jazeera English 219 Applying the Framework 230 6. Conclusion 232 A Return to Burlington 234 Post-Arab Spring Carriage? 237 Back to the Framework 241 AJE’s Options 246 Relevance for AJE Scholarship & Future Research 253 Appendix 257 Bibliography 261 iii LIST OF CHARTS Chapter 2 Chart 2.1 News Packages: OECD 62 Chart 2.2 News Packages: MENA 63 Chart 2.3 News Packages: On Non-OECD Countries 64 Chart 2.4 News Packages vs. Population by Continent 64 Chart 2.5 Bureaus 65 Chart 2.6 News Networks Compared 66 Chart 2.7 News Packages by Topic 68 Chapter 3 Chart 3.1 Cross-national Comparison of AJE Distribution (% Households) 92 Chart 3.2 AJE Daily Website Visits 103 Chart 3.3 AJE, CNN, BBC daily website visits 104 Chart 3.4 YouTube Statistics of AJE and Other News Media 106 Chart 3.5 Link Sources for one AJE YouTube Video 108 Chart 3.6 US Main Source of International and National News 124 Chapter 5 Chart 5.1 Weekly AJE Website Visits, 2011 193 Chart 5.2 Reports on Egypt per Day, January – February, 2011 195 Chart 5.3 Bias ratings of AJE and CNNI by participant condition 223 iv Chart 5.4 Pearson’s correlations of anti-Arab attitudes and ideology with views towards AJE and CNNI 224 Chart 5.5 Reactions to the prospects of AJE's cable carriage 229 Chapter 6 Chart 6.1 AJE Website Visits per Capita 250 v Chapter 1 Introduction I. INTRODUCTION A. Overview Since its foundation in 2006, Al Jazeera English (AJE) developed into a leading global news outlet, yet it has struggled to gain an audience in the United States. Given the centrality of American-Arab relations in international affairs and the historically one-way directionality of news and information flow between the United States and the Arab countries, AJE is a novel phenomenon. It represents the prospects of a historic shift in transnational news flow imbalances. For decades, Arab audiences consumed American media, from movies and music to the news and information produced by government broadcasting arms, such as Voice of America, and the private sector outlet CNN. Americans, on the other hand, had little to no exposure to Arab media. This concern with balance motivated much of the popular discourse and scholarship about Al Jazeera English, the first news media headquartered in the Arab Middle East to actively seek American news consumers. The two primary frameworks guiding global communication scholarship on AJE presume a reversal in the dominant pattern. First, as a new source of news outside of the western informational axis centered in the cities of Atlanta, Washington, DC, New York and London, AJE can challenge the grip of world powers on news and information, a counter-hegemonic potential, given the relationship between power and information (Boyd-Barrett & Xie, 2008; Al-Najjar, 2009; Gardner, 2009; Seib, 2005, 2008; Samuel-Azran, 2010; Sakr, 2007; Painter, 2008). Second, it offers the promise of conciliatory or bridge-building effects between peoples as a medium that expedites inter-cultural understanding 1 and awareness of others at the level of publics (Khamis, 2007; Tehranian, 2006; El-Nawawy and Powers, 2008, 2009, 2010). Before scholarship can consider the greater implications of AJE’s brand of reporting on world affairs, it is necessary to begin with a mapping of the actuality of AJE’s circulation – the focus of this thesis. This immediately generates a problem. The United States is the key market implied in these theoretical approaches given its centricity in international communication. Yet, AJE is not reachable by the vast majority of Americans’ remote controls. This necessarily dampens analysis of wider effects on power and inter-cultural conflict. Before considering impact, we must take an inventory of where and how AJE travels in the country – and why. There are distributional exceptions to its absence, including large centers, such as Washington, DC and parts of New York City, as well as limited cities such as Burlington, VT and Toledo, OH. While it is fully available online, an increasingly key avenue for American news viewership, Internet news consumption is still secondary to TV – one motivation for AJE’s active pursuit of cable deals in the largest majority English-speaking news market. For AJE, distribution in the United States has been a primary goal and source of frustration, despite its easy availability via the Internet. AJE sees cable in particular as the best way to reach, and therefore influence, a wide American audience – which is one of the most vital news markets in the world, given the country’s disproportionate role in world affairs. The primary question of interest is why has it failed to gain wide TV availability and therefore a large audience? A second question is, what does AJE’s absence mean for international communication, US-Arab relations and the channel itself? This study seeks to identify and examine the factors and constraints that keep AJE largely off of American televisions and relate these to the larger theoretical questions posited in AJE and global communication scholarship. Also, there are key 2 junctures, such as the Arab Spring, which rejuvenated the network’s reputation in key quarters of American society. These moments illuminate further how the factors work in explaining AJE’s lack of distribution. When AJE launched, it was available on TV in more than 80 million households worldwide. By early 2012, that number was closer to 250 million households, according to the network – which puts its distribution in close reach of CNN and the BBC1. It can be seen on television sets in more than 100 countries and on six continents. Very few of its TV households are in the United States. At a very generous best, the number as of mid-2012 is 7 million, which is roughly 5% of the national market. This puts its American distribution as anomalously low. Oddly, American demand for AJE as expressed by website visits appears comparatively greater than its TV availability indicates. The channel’s website attracted over 22 million visitors a month in early 2012. Roughly half of its website views came from the United States. This incongruence is the puzzle at this study’s core. B. Research Questions AJE’s exclusion drives the primary research questions: First, and centrally, what are they key structural factors that enable or obstruct foreign news media from gaining access to audiences via distributors? The four main factors or sites of contestation this study considers are political culture; media economics; the larger national and international political context and; AJE’s own agency as a market-seeking actor. These are the components of the study’s framework and are further outlined in another section below. Second, what are the international ramifications of AJE’s lack of availability through traditional carriage means? Given that communication matters for international relations, for 1 Actual audience estimates – as opposed to “availability” – are another issue, arguably more important, though much more difficult to measure reliably. 3 example by promoting inter-cultural understanding or motivating state actions (a la the CNN effect), it would seem to be important that a channel that includes international voices is not made available widely in the United States – even as American news media are widely accessible internationally. Research on AJE has examined whether it can serve as an antidote to the clash of civilizations (Huntington, 1996) or polarization (Khamis, 2007; El-Nawawy and Powers, 2008, 2010). This study imports the problem of poor distribution to this stream of research. Third, how has online distribution figured into this exclusion? While its distribution is miniscule when it comes to American televisions, it has 100% penetration in American Internet homes. This presents possibilities for audience-building in a new media age. AJE’s planners do not see Internet availability as a substitute for cable, however. This may reflect an archaic belief in the possibility of a mass audience for international news in the United States. Still online access offers the only way to circumvent inhospitable distribution markets. Applying a network society thesis (Castells, 1996; 1997), we expect the Internet’s ability to de-center, link and integrate different national publics to give rise to audiences for AJE. New and online media could be expected to engender transnational viewing audiences. For now, this may be AJE’s best chance for gaining an American audience.