Lessons Learned along Edgware Road

LONDON -- Here is what I learned on my journey up and down Edgware Road in London Monday night: It is so easy to stereotype people when you lack knowledge about them, and equally easy to appreciate the nuances and diversity of the same people, if you have access to such knowledge. As I made my way up the street towards a dinner meeting, I observed all the Arab shops and people on the street, all seemingly forming a single cultural unit, and could have easily concluded that Arabs across the region are all the same in their behavior and appearance. This little slice of Arab culture in central London was basically defined by groups of mostly men sitting in cafes smoking water pipes and eating, many women in headscarves, and assorted pairs of men quietly conversing, perhaps making deals or sharing gossip and political jokes. The shops had names like Maroosh snacks, Sitt esh-Sham sweets and Maraheb Café, adding to the feeling that Arabs basically like to eat, above all else.

Fortunately, when I reached the top of Edgware Road I enjoyed a long dinner with colleagues from the journalism and academic world who would appear on a panel Tuesday at the International Communications Association convention, discussing the findings of a fascinating regional survey of how people use the mass media in the Arab world, conducted by Northwestern University in Qatar (NUQ) and released this week. The study based on over 10,000 interviews in eight countries provides valuable new data and insights into the complexities of how ordinary men and women in the Arab world use and view the many media, including satellite television, radio, newspapers, books, internet sites, digital social media, and interpersonal communications. (Full disclosure, I am a member of NUQ’s international advisory board and was invited to be on the panel, but was not involved in any aspect of the study).

The results reveal a web of seemingly contradictory views among people across our region who emerge from this study as real people with different sentiments and influences that shape their characters, rather than the one-dimensional simpletons that are so often depicted in the global media and political circles. For example, people across the region engage deeply in television and websites, but less than half (48%) feel that news media in their country is credible; to make things more complex, there are huge disparities among countries in terms of how people rank the “reliability” of the news they receive from different sources, from a high of 69% for television to a low of 47% for newspapers. The range by country is even steeper, from a high of 93% reliability of television in Jordan to a low of 13% for newspapers in Tunisia.

Television remains the single most important media, followed by internet and radio; but when people were asked about the most important or trusted sources of information on news and current events, almost three-quarters (72%) said that interpersonal sources (family and friends) were the second most important sources after television (83%).

We discussed these and other findings at dinner among our group that included Arabs from Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan and Palestine, and the three American directors of the study, NUQ Dean Everette Dennis and faculty members Justin Martin and Robb Wood. The study, entitled “Media Use in the Middle East: An Eight Nation Study,” also provides valuable new insights into how Arab men and women feel about freedom of expression, and their sense of how safe it is to speak their minds in public, on the internet, for example.

A solid 61% of respondents support freedom of expression on the internet, even for unpopular views, yet half (50%) feel that the internet in their country should be more tightly regulated, with wide variation across countries (as in all aspects of the survey results). Does this reflect a desire by many Arabs to speak their mind freely, but perhaps also to control the content of the media in respect to social or religious values? These and other such questions remain for future studies to clarify.

Some of the findings challenge widely held views, such as the finding that consumers are most interested in local and national news (70% and 73%), followed well behind by regional news (53%) and international news (43%). The survey results, including an interactive facility that allows you to see results by country, gender, age and other variables, is available at menamediasurvey.northwestern.edu.

One hopes that future research across the region will generate more insights into the complex relationships among the changing political realities of people’s lives, and how they use media to express themselves and engage politically or socially to transform societies for the better. For now, thanks to this study, we know more accurately how Arabs consume different media, which might also help us see that all those people on Edgware Road, contrary to their similar appearances, probably are not doing or thinking -- or even eating -- the same thing.

Rami G. Khouri is Editor-at-large of The Daily Star, and Director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut, in Beirut, Lebanon. You can follow him @ramikhouri.