Nailing down a reason for Oprah's top-rated popularity in Saudi Arabia may be closer to speculation than fact. But the themes treated on that show are universal and only occasionally target society-specific issues. More to the point: they're themes treated openly, candidly and honestly--be it rape, domestic abuse, racism or the more esoteric but equally universal hair-raisers of undue flatulence, infuriating teens and narcissistic adults. And they’re themes that people want to know about. But in closed and repressive societies like those of the Arab Peninsula, governments aren’t enabling the sort of discursive climate that makes those conversations and explorations possible. Satellite television, and Oprah, to the rescue.
Arab Television As an Instrument of Change?
The story about Oprah’s foray into Arab mindset speaks of a larger, telling picture about Arab society. As Gordon Robinson, a senior fellow at the USA Annenberg School of Communications, wrote in a 2005 paper entitled “The Rest of Arab Television”: “The common U.S. image of Arab television—endless anti-American rants disguised as news, along with parades of dictators—is far from the truth. In fact, Arab viewers, just like viewers in the U.S., turn to television looking for entertainment first and foremost. (And just as in the U.S., religious TV is a big business throughout the region particularly in the most populous Arab country, Egypt). Arabs and Americans watch many of the same programs—sometimes the American original with Arabic subtitles, but just as often the “Arabized” version of popular reality series and quiz shows.”
Television is the Arab world’s broadest, most accessible window on the West—and on itself. 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?