Murdoch’s Empire Set To Gain Traction In The Middle East

While News Corp faces tribulation in the United Kingdom and the United States due to the NOTW phone hacking scandal, it seems that everything is going smoothly for the launch of UAE-based Sky News Arabia, a 24-hour news channel set to launch in 2012 targeting some 50 million households across Middle East.

Billionaire Saudi Prince Walid bin Talal bin Abdelaziz Al-Saud of Saudi Arabia is the second biggest share holder in Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, News Corp. In a statement published in Forbes, that the prince issued in support of Rupert and James Murdoch’s appearance at the the parliamentary hearings, called that action ‘taking the appropriate steps to bring ethical reform to News Corp.’ The Guardian and other publications link his wielding influence to the swift removal of Rebekah Brooks and Les Hinton, heads of News of the World.

Addressing the difficulty of regulating an entity like Sky News Arabia becomes apparent after reading Al-Jazeera’s article that quotes the critical perspective of media scholar Muhammad Ahmad:

The strangeness of the fact that a Saudi is the second biggest NewsCorp stockholder, and he has never taken any actions to curb or censor bad journalism, and there is no regulation whatsoever, is troubling… News Corp is a corrupt institution, to its foundations, and now it’s trying to get control over Sky Arabia. This should be outrageous for anyone, especially viewers.

Founder of Spinwatch and sociologist Professor David Miller mentioned that the entity will be difficult (if not impossible) to regulate since the authority over Sky News Arabia is unclear.

At least three important questions ought to be discussed:

• How will Sky News Arabia (a joint venture between the Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala and BSkyB) compete against the slew of foreign news channels entering the Middle East market (namely BBC Arabic, CNN Arabic, and China’s CCTV Arabic) and home grown outlets like Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya?
• How quickly will Sky News Arabia grow to begin contributing to the News Corp bottom line?
• What will its coverage be like given Prince Walid’s support for fair elections and the broadening of political involvement for Arab citizens? How will Sky News Arabia frame the push for reforms in the Gulf and North African countries’ push for democracy?