Oprah Goes Arab

The word on the American street is that Arab television is all Al-Jazeera-type anti-Americanism all the time--a preposterous assumption all around. Hard as this is to believe, Arabs are not so engrossed about Americanism (pro or anti) as are Americans about themselves, and when Arab attention does turn the States' way, it does so in much the same way, it turns out, as would the attention of, say, a teen-ager in Kansas: to American television's most popular offerings. Beginning with Oprah.

Oprah? On the Arab Peninsula? Land of Mecca, veils and the fashion police?

Al-Jazeera and other news network like it have shown to the Arab world (and to the rest of the world) that challenging media are not only possible in the Arab world despite the authoritarianism of various governments, but also effective in exposing and questioning that authoritarianism. Satellite television may well be to the Arab world what the fax machine was to Solidarity, the revolutionary Polish trade union movement of the early 1980s—an irrepressible instrument of social subversion.

However unlikely and unintended, it may yet turn out to be an instrument of social change, raising this quite sensible question: Could Oprah’s 48 minutes a day on Arab TV, twice a day, be a more powerful and positive force of social subversion in the Middle East than George W. Bush’s missionary armies could ever hope to be? Read my full account of "Oprah's Quiet Conquest of Arab Airwaves."

See also:

• The Verdict on Al-Jazeera
• Go West, Young Imam: Saudi Media Abroad
• Elizabeth Borer's All About Oprah Site
• Around the World With Oprah
• "The Rest of Arab Television," by Gordon Robinson (pdf)