World’s Newest Media Hub Has Everything but Freedom of the Press

It’s no secret that media is an industry in dire need of a White Knight. Will it be the iPad? The sudden, improbable rebound of advertising rates? The demise of the internet? Right now, it seems the most successful (least bankrupt) traditional media companies are hanging in there thanks to a billionaire benefactor whose deep pockets are allowing a news organization to stomach losses most business owners couldn’t hack. Rupert Murdoch’s truthy-ish Fox News is helping prop up The Wall Street Journal. Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s nifty terminals finance his eponymous news organization, which now includes a TV network and BusinessWeek. And Carlos Slim’s telecom empire bought him a piece of the Grey Lady.

Now there’s another wave of billionaires here to invest in our flagging sector, a whole clan of ‘em. The Al Nahayans, the royal ruling family of Abu Dhabi are on a multi-billion dollar campaign to make the oil-flush city-state a hub of all things media. As the AP duly notes:

It has set up a company to bankroll Hollywood films, built an office park to house foreign news agencies, and spent billions to invest in microchips that power the electronic gadgets that increasingly serve as platforms for media consumption.

It is also partnering with established Western brands, including National Geographic and Comedy Central, to develop Arabic-language programming, and is splashing out on big-name concerts for eager audiences at home. Recent shows featured Rihanna, Aerosmith and Beyonce.

Via Abu Dhabi Pumps Oil Riches Into Media Projects – NYTimes.com.

Along with the art museums, the prestigious universities and the carbon-neutral city, the rush to build a media empire is part of the emirate’s grand plan to diversify its economy away from oil. It’s a move only a multi-billionaire could justify: they’re not concerned with returns or ad rates. For them, it’s a relatively cheap way to get a lot of attention, fast. I’d wager to guess that at least 50% of Americans have never heard of Abu Dhabi. A little Hollywoodization would change that in a hurry. Tomorrow, the government is hosting a summit for “media and entertainment elite” including Murdoch (who recently bought a stake in Saudi Arabia’s biggest media company and is moving some of Fox’s global offices to Abu Dhabi) and Google’s Eric Schmidt. The country’s new daily paper, The National, whose mission is to “reinforce Abu Dhabi’s status as a global economic center” has poached writers from The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, luring them with (gasp) a salary and benefits.

Does all this mean a new lease on life for traditional media? It’s doubtful. The sheikhs’ billions,  exciting as it seems, is no panacea for what ails the industry. It’s a sexy way for the city to grab attention and court some bigwigs but as to the larger problem- how to monetize all this TV/news/music- it offers little.

More troubling, is the fact that this new global media hub is materializing in a country and region not known for its free press. Criticism of the royal family is verboten, reporting negative economic news is discouraged and a law aimed at liberalizing some of the constitution’s more draconian media restrictions has been in limbo for nearly a year. Would an influx of global media brands pressure the government into adopting freer media policies…or will media fall in line with what their financiers implicitly want?

The trickiness of the situation is embodied by an Op-Ed that ran last week in Dubai’s local (government-owned) paper the Gulf News, railing against the National Media Council (NMC), the UAE’s government body that oversees media:

Standards have declined such that newspapers carry a little news, advertisements and a few shallow words. They have also lost their role as a watchdog. The NMC and editors of newspapers ignore the fact that today’s reader has changed and does not look for official statements in newspapers, because he can turn to internet news sites and forums for the information he wants. However, the most critical issue is that the government has become much more aggressive with the media and its people. The list of banned subjects is growing, and there are more instructions not to publish certain stories. Furthermore, editors-in-chief are used to applying pressure on journalists, which has turned some of these editors into representatives of the government, practising vicious censorship of their own newspapers.

Via gulfnews : The ceiling of press freedom in UAE is falling

A grim assessment. The good news: that it was published at all.