SOAS Arab Media Conference

Posted By Marc Lynch Tuesday, March 17, 2009 - 9:23 AM Share

As I sit in a Heathrow waiting lounge, a belated welcome to my friend Brian Katulis, who will be guest-posting from the UAE and Kuwait this week. I've just finished a fascinating conference on the Arab media at SOAS, which was a particularly interesting experience after a few days at the Al-Jazeera forum. Khaled al-Shami, media columnist for al-Quds al-Arabi and more recently of the independent Egyptian al-Hewar TV, nicely captured one theme of debate with his remark that there is too much politics in the Arab media, and too much media in Arab politics.

Jihad Fakhreddine, a long-time analyst of Arab media audiences and market research, did a very good job of pouring cold water on the quality of the available data. Echoing points I've often made, he pointed out that most companies in the region (including Arab TV stations) are only interested in audience research if it shows that they are #1. Add in what he called the unhealthy competition for contracts by the market research providers, and it's not hard to unpack what happens next. He also did a brutal job of pointing out the methodological deficiencies in most of those surveys -- particularly their defiant non-use of random samples, which too often leaves their data dependent on unreliable snowball samples with sharply skewed demographics. "More data" isn't better if it's bad data. This doesn't apply to the 'gold standard' surveys, but even they struggle with the absence of reliable census data to create usable sampling frames.

My panel was a superb collection of Arab bloggers, including Wael Abbas, Nassem Tarawneh, Ali Abdelemam, and others. We talked a lot about what blogs can and can't achieve. My bottom line was that we won't know the answer to that question for 10 years since the ultimate contribution will be to create a new generation of youth able and willing to participate fully in Arab public life - whether they are welcomed or not. But since my flight is about to board I will have to talk about that panel some other time.