Saturday, 7 March 2009
The International Strategic Research Organization (USAK) has organized a conference with the Embassy of Canada in Ankara, which was given by Dr. Adel Iskandar, a distinguished scholar from Georgetown University, Washington DC, on Friday, March 6th, 2009 in the conference hall of the Embassy.
The title of the conference was "Media in Turkey and in the Arab World: Similarities and Differences". Dr. Iskandar was introduced by Sedat Laciner, the director of USAK.
Dr. Iskandar began his speech by expressing the main features of Turkish and Arab media and their evolution in time. Then he addressed main differences between them. Focusing on the example of Al-Jazeera, he underlined that Turkish broadcasting speaks to one nation whereas Arab media has evolved in time so as to address a greater audience, composed of 22 nations and states.
The relative state-dependencies of Turkish and Arab media were one of the underlining themes of the conference. Dr. Iskandar mentioned that there is a direct link between the identity formation of a nation and media structure. According to Dr. Iskandar, Turkey, as a nation-state aims at consolidating a sense of nationhood with its state-owned media. However, he added that Turkish private media possesses considerable plurality, whereas in Arab media private ownership is in the hand of individuals close to the ruling elite. He said that even Al-Jazeera, which believed to blaze a trail in Arab broadcasting by constituting an alternative to national media and adopting a latent anti-Westerner discourse, works in line with Qatari government.
Dr. Iskandar touched upon the cultural interaction between Arab and Turkish society, provided by media, as exemplified through the popularity of Turkish TV series in the Arab world, as well.
Dr. Adel Iskandar, a Middle East media scholar and activist and the author and co-author of several seminal works on Arab media, most prominently the first major analysis of the Arab satellite station Al-Jazeera, is on a Middle Eastern trip for a series of conferences. On Thursday, March 5th 2009, he had given another conference in Ankara, on "Al-Jazeera and the New Global Media and Communications" at Middle East Technical University, International Relations Department. He is having a major impact on the interdisciplinary study of international communication and his work is highly regarded for its contribution to understanding the effect of media on Arab audiences both in the Middle East and across the world.
