Tag Archives: Qatar

What is public service broadcasting?

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Public Service BroadcastingAs a pro­fessor with a back­ground in pub­lic ser­vice broad­cast­ing (PSB), I’m often asked — What exactly is pub­lic ser­vice broadcasting?

Take a pop­u­lar pro­gramme like Neigh­bours. From 1986 to 2008 it appeared on the BBC and was an import­ant piece of PSB, pop­u­lar with view­ers, and val­ued for its air­ing of gritty but uni­ver­sal human themes played out in an Anti­podean setting.

Alas, in Feb­ru­ary of last year it moved to Five, and became a piece of com­mer­cial, schedule-filling tat that appealed to the low­est com­mon denom­in­ator. Con­tinue read­ing →

Al Jazeera English — the mouth of the south?

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Counter-Hegemonic NewsJames Painter has just pro­duced a study called Counter-Hegemonic News [down­load pdf] — look­ing at Qatar’s Al Jaz­eera Eng­lish and Venezuela’s Tele­sur.

I have to say, in the case of AJE, I think both the per­son­nel and the tra­di­tions they draw on are simply those of con­ven­tional for­eign news. Con­tinue read­ing →

Wikipedia: the gift that keeps on giving…

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It seems that even tele­vi­sion is not safe from Wiki­pe­dia spot­ters. A Syr­ian blog points to some smooth script re-purposing over at Al Jaz­eera Eng­lish on their series A Ques­tion of Arab Unity.

ALJAZ
“Nas­ser and his fel­low officers assured Bri­tain that it would respect Brit­ish cit­izens and prop­erty in Egypt, lim­it­ing the pos­sib­il­ity of inter­ven­tion against the coup. The revolu­tion­ar­ies also bowed to Amer­ican pres­sure by allow­ing the deposed King Farouk and his fam­ily to leave Egypt.”

WIKIPEDIA
“[T]he newly installed gov­ern­ment imme­di­ately assured Bri­tain that it would respect Brit­ish cit­izens and prop­erty in Egypt, greatly dimin­ish­ing the pos­sib­il­ity of inter­ven­tion against the coup. Nas­ser and his fel­low revolu­tion­ar­ies also bowed to Amer­ican pres­sure by allow­ing the deposed King Farouk and his fam­ily to leave Egypt.”

Spot the dif­fer­ence? Some nice copy-and-pasting going on in Doha.

There is more, too.