Iraqi 'Ninth Studio' avoids TV's sectarian divide
Although Iraqi media outlets gained some freedoms post-2003, in the past 10 years much of the country’s media has been highly sectarian, but a few outlets are challenging that stereotype.
Since 2003, the televised media environment in Iraq has witnessed dramatic changes. Whereas Iraqis were once forced to choose between only two local television stations — one administered by the Ministry of Information and the other run by the son of then-President Saddam Hussein — they now have dozens of satellite channels reporting on national affairs.
One of the most noteworthy phenomena in the initial months following the fall of Saddam's regime was the rush of Iraqi families to purchase satellite dishes — a trend from which even extremely impoverished Iraqis were not immune. This trend reflected a deep hunger on the part of many Iraqis to learn about the outside world from which they had been cut off by the old regime's extremely strict official censorship. Iraq undertook a rapid and astounding transition from a model of censorship resembling what George Orwell described in his novel 1984 toward what former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld described as a state of "untidy” freedom.
In a short period of time, Iraqi satellite television channels began to vie with the larger pan-Arab channels such as Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya for coverage of Iraqi affairs. The first of these channels was the official Al-Iraqiyya, founded in hopes that it would become an Iraqi version of the BBC, a public, independent channel funded by state coffers. Then other channels began to appear, like Al-Sharqiya, Al-Baghdadiya, Al-Sumeriyyah, all of which were private projects, even though some of them secured foreign patronage.
There is a widespread belief that the official Iraqi channel has lost its independence and been completely reduced to subservience to the will and dictates of the government, even to the point that members of parliament have threatened to block funding for its operating budget. In similar fashion, most other Iraqi channels have become captive to political influences either hostile or sympathetic toward the government. Many have concluded that the media outlets in Iraq are actually deepening the country's ethnic and sectarian divides, rather than working to overcome them.
