Ayoon Wa Azan (What About the Arab Print Media?)

I have with me the statistics pertaining to British newspaper sales in 2011. The numbers show that the circulation of all daily papers fell behind the circulation numbers for 2010. While some Sunday tabloids increased their circulation last year, the circulation of major papers, the pillars of British media, has taken a slump. I go over these figures month after month, and at the end of the year, I compare the figures with those of the previous year. The numbers are always in decline, confirming the opinion of many that the print media is on the verge of extinction. British newspapers are a good indicator, because their sales figures are accurate down to the one single issue. For one thing, the figures are issued by the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC), a company jointly owned by the British papers. ABC monitors sales so well that its lists show both the figures pertaining to newspapers sold at the official rates, and at the discount rates. By contrast, the figures on the sales of Arab newspapers are haphazard, to say the least. I once heard the editor of a major Arab newspaper telling his country’s president that the paper sold 25 thousand copies in Europe every day. However, the majority of Arab newspapers in Europe are distributed by the French company Hachette, which discloses circulation figures, and these show that the paper in question sold 1200 copies every day. This episode made me wonder whether the declared circulation of the paper in its country of origin was also multiplied by a factor of twenty, as was the case with its European circulation numbers. I was reading the numbers against the backdrop of the Leveson Inquiry Commission (named after its chair, the judge Lord Leveson), which has been investigating, since July of last year, practices of the British press, following the phone hacking scandal revolving around the Sunday paper The News of the World, where phones of politicians and celebrities were allegedly hacked. The scandal culminated with the closure of the most-widely circulated paper in Britain, and which is owned by the Australian-born publisher Rupert Murdoch. The phone hacking scandal led to calls for better regulation of newspapers. Lionel Barber, editor of the Financial Times, called for the formation of a new independent press regulator with powers to impose fines, require corrections to be published prominently and launch investigations. But then FT is a credible financial publication that is above board, and for this reason, it has no fear of more regulation. Conversely, officials at The Times, also published by Murdoch’s group, whose illegal practices led to the official inquiry, rejected any regulation as they were interviewed by the Leveson Commission, saying that regulation would destroy the newspapers. This was echoed by Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian, who strongly objected to a politician having a say in what newspapers publish, and also Ian Hislop, editor of Private Eye, who said that if the government oversees the press, then the press would no longer be able to oversee the government. I noticed that all those who appeared before the Commission of Inquiry said that the published material was in the ‘public interest’, but they disagreed on the definition of this term, and whether what interests the readers is indeed ‘public interest’, or whether it is a violation of the personal freedom of a famous football star, actor or politician caught in a sex scandal. On the other hand, Paul McMullan, a former deputy features editor at News of the World, told almost unbelievable stories about the Murdoch group of companies, and how he once tried to set up a perverted priest whom he chased in his underwear, and how he hacked people’s phones by order of editors and senior management. He also called Rebekah Brooks, former executive director of the group in Britain, an “arch-criminal”. Next month, the Leveson Inquiry will address the relationship between the newspapers in question and the police, as there is established information that Murdoch’s papers had bribed members of the police in return for information about any investigations into celebrity scandals for follow-up. Personally, I believe that the decline in newspaper circulation will ultimately solve the problem, because if these papers are not dead and buried in our lifetimes, then their sales and influence will shrink to such an extent that they will no longer be a nuisance to the government or the stars of society. But what about the Arab print media? Well, the Arab papers are not free to begin with, lest we talk about the threat of appointing a regulator to deny it what it doesn’t have in the first place. Yet, I say that the future belongs to the new media, since it is outside of official oversight and censorship, and it is for this reason that the new media has played the main role in launching the Arab uprisings, while the traditional media slept on the laurels of glories that only exist in the imagination, and what a vast imagination that is.