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7 @ From Satellite to Screen How Arab TV Is Shaped in Space naomi sakr One of the most intriguing questions about Arab satellite television has always been how far the technical possibilities of transnational broadcasting could offer a real, practical escape from national regulation, since national regulation in most Arab countries is designed to prop up incumbent regimes. It was apparent by the end of the 1990s that a majority of Arab governments were complicit in an emerging pan-Arab system of governance over transnational broadcasts. Under this system, mutually agreed controls operated at the national level to limit the ability of any dissenting broadcaster (in particular , Al-Jazeera) to report or uplink within the region at will.1 It also emerged that national regulation and intergovernmental agreements outside the Arab world could equally obstruct satellite broadcasting to Arab countries. This was amply demonstrated to Kurdish residents of Iraq and Syria when Turkish government pressure on regulators and service providers in France, Portugal, Spain, Germany, Poland, Slovakia, and the United Kingdom led to withdrawal of permissions and services from the Kurdish satellite station, Med-TV.2 Examples of non-Arab intervention multiplied in the 2000s, with the introduction of special legislation in France to deny the station Al-Manar, associated with the Lebanese movement Hizbollah, access to the satellites of Paris-based Eutelsat. Consultations among European national audiovisual regulators then led to Al-Manar being dropped from other satellites , both U.S. and European owned.3 These moves seemed to suggest that use of satellite technology is subject to political decisions by governments that act together, both inside the Arab region and the Global North. Ultimately, however, the question about potential dislocation between national regulation and transnational communication remains unanswered, because regulatory action against Med-TV, Al-Manar, Al-Jazeera, and others could not block them entirely. Med-TV was reincarnated as Medya TV, based in Belgium with a satellite uplink from France, and when France cut that link in 2004, Roj TV took over as its successor from Denmark. It continued broadcasting for more than three years amid tense exchanges on the subject between the Turkish and Danish governments.4 Al-Manar meanwhile continued to broadcast from Nilesat and Arabsat, which are both under the jurisdiction of Arab governments. By April 2008, Al-Manar had also begun broadcasts via Indonesia Telkom’s Palapa C2 satellite, having been removed in January that year from the Thai satellite Thaicom after a three-day test run.5 An administrative order by the German interior ministry in November 2008 to “ban” Al-Manar in Germany received considerable publicity, since it applied to advertising, fund-raising, and broadcasting in hotels. Yet it stopped short of banning reception in private homes with dishes large enough to receive transmissions from Nilesat and Arabsat.6 Americans wanting to watch Al-Jazeera English, launched in late 2006, could likewise do so using a satellite dish from GlobeCast, a division of France Telecom, even though political resistance to distribution of the channel in the United States limited its availability on cable systems in the thirty-two months it took for a breakthrough to be achieved in mid-2009.7 One way to frame the question raised by these examples is to ask, as Lisa Parks has done, whether satellite television practices have “cut and divided the planet in ways that support the cultural and economic hegemony of the (post)industrial West,” or whether there persists a more differentiated struggle over meanings and uses, in which practices are mobilized in different times and places for or against militarization, corporatization, and so on.8 In much the same way, Colin Sparks has noted that “the continued centrality of imperialism in explanations of the contemporary world” does not mean we should go along with theories of cultural imperialism.9 The task instead is to expose the multiple realities of power relations, whereby—for example—people who run media operations in the so-called developing world often feel more threatened by the poor and disenfranchised in their own countries than by governing elites in politically and economically powerful states.10 The challenge, therefore, in reviewing struggles for control over satellite broadcasts is to know whether players act alone or in concert, and whether joint action reflects networks that may give the lie to what Lena Jayyusi has called the “counterfeit geographies” of the Middle East.1 1 These are geographies linked to one-sided or distorted perceptions and discourses derived from a “military...

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