Region's best set for Arab Media Forum

A large line-up of international journalists and professionals from the media field will descend on Dubai to attend the 8th Arab Media Forum which is hosted today by the Dubai Press Club (DPC) at the Atlantis Hotel in Dubai.

DPC, organiser of the Forum, said the annual event will be attended by more than 1,000 participants including 57 speakers, 11 moderators and 300 participants from the GCC countries, Mauritania, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Libya, Yemen, Sudan, Iraq, Palestine, Malaysia, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, China, Italy, India and Russia.

The Arab Media Form's agenda touches on several recurring issues in the Arab media industry, mainly the impacts of the global economic developments on the media. Other issues to be discussed include new media, investigative journalism and the Arabic versions of international media corporations.

Maryam Bin Fahad had earlier noted that the Arab Media Forum will present an update on the media outlook for the region, following the report issued by Dubai Press Club and PriceWaterhouseCoopers last February.

Renowned journalist Seymour Hersh, the American investigative journalist, will be speaker at two of the Forum's sessions. Other leaders of regional and international media will also participate in the debates.

Todd Benjamin, former CNN presenter and financial and economic expert; Martha Hamilton, columnist at AARP Bulletin Today; Hu Shuli, Founding Editor of Caijing Magazine (China Economist); Professor Mohamed Ariff, Executive Director at Malaysian Institute of Economic Research; Steven Hall, Chief Executive Officer, CNBC Arabia and Lorenzo Trombetta, Middle East correspondent for ANSA News Agency.

Among the prominent names from the Arab World are Abdul Moneim Said, Director of Al Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies; Azzam Al Dakhil, CEO of Saudi Research & Marketing Group (SRMG); Jameel Al Theyabi , Managing Editor, Al Hayat newspaper; Sami Raffoul, Director, Pan Arab Research Center; Mohammed Abdullah, Executive Director, Dubai Media City; Jihad Al Kazen, columnist at Al Hayat newspaper; Nabil Al Khateb, Editor-in-Chief, Al Arabiya Channel; Ahmad Al Shaikh, Editor-in-Chief, Al Jazeera Channel, Salah Negm, Director of News, BBC Arabia.

Three debut workshops are to be held simultaneously today, ensuring a thorough discussion of all the relevant aspects of the television media in the region, particularly the content that the channels offer to the public and the unprecedented boom in the last two years that resulted in a mushrooming of channels.

The first workshop titled "Egyptian TV Channels: Will They Restore Glory to the Egyptian Media?" and will look at the immense growth of private channels in Egypt in recent times.

The session is aiming to shed light on the television map of Egypt, which is apparently giving a new shape to the profession of media in Egypt and the region.

The second workshop will seek to take up another salient feature on the television scene in the region: the proliferation of fatwa programs. Titled "From Terrestrial Fatwa to Satellite Fatwa", the workshop will look at the phenomenon of instant fatwa, an issue that raises a number of questions about the credibility of this whole exercise.

The third workshop on "Popular Heritage Channels: Message or Entertainment?" will analyse the emergence of channels devoted to popular heritage in the Arab World, particularly in the Gulf countries. Though they are winning viewers increasingly and their popularity is on the rise, some of them are allegedly going beyond their original objective of creating awareness about heritage among the new generations. They generally convert heritage-related concepts into mere entertainment.

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