New entry in the Arabic television landscape: a consideration on the type of audience and the socio-political repercussions in a strategic area for Europe

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BBC Arabic Television: so it is called the Arabic television channel launched by the BBC last March 11 and financed entirely by the Foreign Office. Unlike pan-Arab broadcasters Al-Jazeera (Qatar) and Al-Arabiya (Saudi Arabia), however, it will not support the interests of the Islamists but it will try to keep safe the objectivity of news and to foster the dialogue between cultures, acting as a go-between for information for the Muslim populations of the Middle East, North Africa and the Persian Gulf.

"BBC Arabic, the Arabic radio service of the BBC, is already renowned for its accurate and impartial coverage", says in an interview the director of BBC World Service, Nigel Chapman, that even on the television front-line ensures "we have a style and we will make a strong and independent journalism".

Firstly, the new channel will be broadcasted 12 hours a day but it is going to increase to 24 on 24, seven days a week, by the summer. The schedule provides updated news every 15 minutes and a complete tv news every 30, all thanks to 250 correspondents located at 72 BBC offices around the world.

Therefore, a bitter competition between the newborn but promising BBC Arabic TV and the established Al-Jazeera, indicated by Time magazine, three years ago, as one of the 100 most influential organizations throughout the world, is to start.

On March 13, Malek Triki, the well known face and the leader of the Network Al-Jazeera at the London headquarters, held a conference at the University “L’Orientale” in Naples, entitled "Towards a Democratization of the Cross-cultural Communications System".

The journalist, supporter of the pan-Arab feeling and convinced that this channel, through its solidarity with the cause of the Arabic world, supports the spread of it, quoted a statement by the Israeli president Shimon Peres that goes back a few years ago and that, referring to the Arabic channel, had defined it as: "the best thing that could happen to the Arabic world”.

Then, replying to a question about the recent attempts of Israel to boycott the Arabic TV channel, accused of lack of impartiality regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Triki defends himself, saying that Al-Jazeera ''has been the first Arabic media to give space in its programs, to the statements of Israeli politicians and intellectuals who support the hard-line against the Palestinians and justify the occupation''.

Facing these statements and the reputation of which Al-Jazeera benefits, for the BBC in Arabic, a period of difficult choices opens. If, in fact, on the one hand, it attracts enormous enthusiasm and international favours, on the other hand there is a very strong opponent, made itself known in the middle of an enormous amount of local broadcasters competitors and, to this day, the all-news channel more followed in the Arabic world. It will be in a position, then, to impose itself in the wide media landscape and, above all, to attract the attention of the Arab community? It also will be able to earn, by 2010, those 20 million viewers it strives to?