State-controlled media in the Arab world are the walking dead, says the Institute for War & Peace Reporting. They’re right. State-controlled media is dead, but as they continue to collect paychecks, they refuse to lie down and give up the spirit completely.

Once upon a time, information could be controlled. A government could manage to suppress news it didn’t like. I saw a traffic accident in Syria, for example, in which dozens were killed (the accident involved a bus and a gasoline tanker). Even though it took place on the main highway linking Damascus with Aleppo, it went unreported in all media. Saudi Arabia withheld news of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait for days while it figured out what its political stance should be. Even now, government try—in vain—to filter or block websites they deem politically incorrect, however they’re defining ‘incorrect’ today.

The attempt to control information, though, is futile. No state can control media that originates outside its borders. A state can try to influence media. Sometimes it’s through subsidies that can be granted or withheld at the whim of rulers. Sometimes it can punish media by imprisoning writers and editors, withholding publishing permits, or blocking distribution. In extremis, it can try to jam radio and TV signals. These measures, at one time effective, have lost their power to new technologies whose channels lie beyond the grasp of government. The only way to stop them is to condemn the country to living in a pre-Information Revolution state and that is to commit economic suicide.

Trust is the issue here and Arab audiences and readers no longer trust their governments to tell the truth. They no longer wish to be consumers of partial information and be kept ignorant of inconvenient truths. Arab governments can save themselves serious money by simply giving up on trying to control the message. At best, they can only try to influence it through transparency in their actions and truth in their statements. They don’t need TV and radio stations to do that. They only need the will.

Future Bleak for State-Owned Arab Media
Experts say that Arab Spring will weaken government mouthpieces
Zoe Holman – The Arab Spring

The future of the state-run media in the Middle East and North Africa has been called into question by the social and political upheaval in the region, observers say.

Government-controlled media outlets look likely to become ever more of an anachronism as people in the region increasingly turn to social media as well as satellite television channels.

“There is no future for Arab state media,” said the London-based Huffington Post blogger and social commentator, Faisal Abbas, speaking at an event organised by the Frontline Club last week.

The legitimacy of outlets like Egypt’s Al-Ahram newspaper, Abbas argued, had long been undermined in the eyes of Egyptians by the regime’s continued, ill-disguised interference with editorial content, as was evident last year when the title printed a doctored photograph showing then president Hosni Mubarak walking down a red carpet ahead of US president Barack Obama and the Israeli, Palestinian and Jordanian leaders.
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