Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Preface
- Introduction: Beyond al-Jazeera
- 1 Screens of Contention: The Battle for Arab Viewers
- 2 Voting Islam Off the Island? Big Brother in Bahrain
- 3 The Saudi-Lebanese Connection
- 4 Contesting Reality: Star Academy and Islamic Authenticity in Saudi Arabia
- 5 Gendering Reality: Kuwait in the Eye of the Storm
- 6 A Battle of Nations: Superstar and the Lebanon-Syria Media War
- 7 The “New Middle East”? Reality Television and the “Independence Intifada”
- Conclusion: Performing Politics, Taming Modernity
- List of Interviews
- Further Readings
- Bibliography
- Index
- Titles in the Series
Conclusion: Performing Politics, Taming Modernity
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Preface
- Introduction: Beyond al-Jazeera
- 1 Screens of Contention: The Battle for Arab Viewers
- 2 Voting Islam Off the Island? Big Brother in Bahrain
- 3 The Saudi-Lebanese Connection
- 4 Contesting Reality: Star Academy and Islamic Authenticity in Saudi Arabia
- 5 Gendering Reality: Kuwait in the Eye of the Storm
- 6 A Battle of Nations: Superstar and the Lebanon-Syria Media War
- 7 The “New Middle East”? Reality Television and the “Independence Intifada”
- Conclusion: Performing Politics, Taming Modernity
- List of Interviews
- Further Readings
- Bibliography
- Index
- Titles in the Series
Summary
This book set out to understand why, how, and with what consequences the Arab reality TV battles mixed politics, religion, business, and sexuality, setting Arab public discourse ablaze in times of political crisis, military strife, and religious tension. As we come to the end of the story, it is useful to recall some of the big questions that animated this book. The pretense of reality TV to represent reality inspired the first question: What is the relation between reality TV and social reality? Many Arab journalists, we have seen, grappled with the answer, which goes to the heart of the social authority of the media; a couple of years into the Arab reality TV polemics and two months after al-Hariri's assassination, a columnist captured the situation as follows:
After reality TV programs occupied an important part of social “reality” during the last two years, reality TV's status has begun a decline, bowing to the shocks of the real “reality.” … Real reality won the gamble, outshining the program that had to leave the limelight for a time … which seems to have killed the notion of “real TV” [in English]…. As if these shows lost their luster, and their realism, and rushed towards the real reality whose realism they sought to appropriate…. Didn't Big Brother shake and stir Bahrain? … The realism of that show provoked the real reality and became part of social reality, and not the other way around. […]
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- Chapter
- Information
- Reality Television and Arab PoliticsContention in Public Life, pp. 192 - 214Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009