No Pictures Please!
The glistening sunlight is reflected in the glass facade of Media City, but by four in the afternoon it's already dark. That's when the sun disappears behind a row of skyscrapers, some of them forty storeys higher than Media City itself.
When it was set up as a media centre in 2001, Dubai's Media City was surrounded only by the wide, unpopulated deserts of the Arabian Peninsula.
Now, as far as the eye can see, everything is covered in concrete, and there's an artificial yacht marina nearby. For years, Dubai has been growing at high speed, with an annual 12 per cent increase in population and 15 per cent economic growth.
Now the miracle of the desert is beginning to fade. The economy of the United Arab Emirates is in just as much trouble as those of other countries around the world. But because there are so many expatriates living there, the effects are particularly dramatic.
Research institutes estimate that the population of Dubai will fall by 10 per cent a year in both 2009 and 2010. Construction sites are at a standstill. Projects have been cancelled. But no-one's supposed to report on all that.
Dubai: an invention of the media
The media played a significant role in the rise of Dubai. From the start they were supposed to communicate a picture of a glittering Dubai to the rest of the world.
The Dubai PR project was kicked off in 2000 with the opening of the Burj al-Arab hotel. This futuristic construction in the form of a sail was to be the focus around which the image of an ambitious, liberal, future-oriented Emirate was to be spun – a country in which it was worth investing.
"Dubai is basically a invention of the media," says Ghanem Nuseibeh, analyst with Political Capital, a Hungarian think-tank specialising in the Gulf. "It was created and formed by advertising and marketing."
Most of the big international TV and news channels have set up office in the Dubai Media City, from CNN and BBC, via Thomson-Reuters, to al-Arabiya and Deutsche Welle TV.
The idea of turning Dubai not just into a hub for trade and finance, but also for media, seems to have worked.
Others in the region are trying to copy Dubai. Its greatest competitor in the fight for media presence is Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates. The rulers there have always eyed the transformation of Dubai into a "Disneyland on the Gulf" – as the usual accusation goes – with suspicion.
Limited press freedom
Abu Dhabi wants to establish itself as a stylish alternative. In 2008, it started a project to build "2Four54", as the new media city is to be called, after the latitude and longitude of the capital.
The journalist Rym Ghazal of the newspaper The National in Abu Dhabi considers that the power of the media has been underestimated for too long. "Now," he says, "Abu Dhabi, which is the richest of the Emirates in oil wealth, plans to deploy a substantial budget in order to overtake Dubai Media City."
But all is not well in terms of press freedom in the Emirates. In the annual press freedom ranking published by "Reporters without Borders", the UAE ranks 69th out of 173. The domestic media in particular is subject to restrictions. A wide-ranging Internet censorship blocks many websites, including news sites.
Although the stated aim of the censors is to block excessively revealing portrayals of the female form, in the course of removing the offending display of skin, they often also block news and information. This applies, for example, to the internet edition of the German tabloid Bild. Not just the Page One girl gets deleted, whole articles appear as white space.
Restrictions on critical voices
As well as the direct blocking of information by the censor, the country also uses criminal law to restrict the free flow and supply of information.
Negative or critical statements about the ruling families of the various emirates are usually punished by deportation. In Spring 2009, the case of a member of the ruling family of Abu Dhabi made headlines after he had an Afghan tortured in the desert. Videos of the incident were broadcast on YouTube. But the story didn't appear on local media: the journalists would have put themselves at risk of criminal prosecution.
Since Spring 2009, there has been a tendency to make the work of journalists even more difficult. The list of criminal offences under which specific actions by journalists are punishable is currently being substantially extended. This increased severity is due to the financial crisis and its negative effect on the economy of the UAE.
Ghanem Nuseibeh notes that the rulers on the Gulf have started to control content more strictly in these times of crisis. "New draft laws include large fines for reports which work against political and economic interests," he says. "That can mean almost anything, depending on how an individual controller sees a specific report. This legal framework threatens to lead to an indiscriminate criminalisation of journalists." Media companies which include critical material in their reporting will be punishable with a $500,000 fine – for each individual case.
The roles which the media play in Western politics and society – namely the roles of keeping an eye on what the authorities are doing and of fostering open debate in society – are precisely the roles which they are to be prevented from playing in the UAE.
In addition, here in the UAE, the Western concept of journalism is confronted with a world in which dissent is traditionally dealt with behind the closed doors of the tribe, and not in public debate.
Monitoring the foreign media
Television has the added difficulty of the traditional Muslim ban on images, which the people of the Gulf have taken to heart far more than the people of other parts of the Muslim world, so that it also has an effect on the life of work.
Many observers doubt that the new media strategy will bring much benefit to the UAE. Says Christian Koch of the Dubai-based independent think tank Gulf Research Centre: "This approach encourages rumours, because people think that everyone else has something to hide, that they aren't open and honest, and they're talking up the situation. It would be far more useful to admit that there are problems."
More recently, there have been moves to monitor foreign media more closely and in some cases impose sanctions on them. One example of this tougher line towards foreign journalists was the experience of the British news organisation BBC last spring.
Its TV news magazine Panorama carried a report on the living conditions in the workers' camps on the edge of Dubai city in which hundreds of thousands of foreign construction workers from South and South-East Asia live.
Scratches appeared on Dubai's glistening façade. The BBC was threatened with the withdrawal of its licence to broadcast from Media City. The stakes are high for the Emirates. They owe their emergence as a global success story to the media. With their new media strategy they are taking risks with their image – both at home and abroad.
Constantin Schreiber
© KULTURAUSTAUSCH III /2009
Constantin Schreiber, born 1979, is a lawyer and journalist. He is currently working in the German Foreign Ministry where he is responsible for German media projects in the Arab world. He was previously correspondent for Deutsche Welle's Arabic-language TV programme in Dubai
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