Arab Media & Society

 In 2001 Syria opened its media outlets to private ownership for the first time in over forty years. More than a year after coming to power, President Bashar al-Asad issued Decree 50, which overturned a 1963 revolutionary decree outlawing privately owned publications. While Decree 50 is often rosily credited with reforming the Syrian mediascape, it actually instituted more restrictions on publishers and journalists than ever before. This includes forcing journalists to reveal their sources, as well as imposing fines and jail terms for journalists or publishers who disobey the guidelines or publish without a license.¹ As details of Decree 50 make clear, opening the door for the privately owned press in Syria did not ensure a press free of restrictions.

 Officials from the public media sector lauded the establishment of the private media as yet another “modernizing” reform enacted by Bashar that would “serve the nation.”² Western news reports have focused on the historical momentousness of the emergence of the private press in Syria, remarking that even though the press may not be “independent” by Western standards, it could mark the beginning of a new era of press freedom.³ Almost a decade later, the same English-language outlets have rejected elements of Syria’s media privatization as a fraud, reporting that the country’s private outlets are owned by wealthy businessmen close to the regime, and while some outlets may be breaking social “taboos”, their inability (or unwillingness) to criticize the regime strips them of credibility in the eyes of Western journalists.⁴ Even while recognizing the remaining restrictions on Syrian journalists in a market-oriented media system, the subtext in the Western coverage remains: private ownership is the base qualification that the Syrian media must meet in order to become truly “developed” by Western standards.

Since Western news outlets immediately interpreted any move toward media privatization as a positive change in media structure, they neglected to report how Syria’s media privatization was actually more indicative of the country’s recent economic liberalization policies rather than a sign of intent to implement a Western-style media system. On the other hand, business-oriented groups such as the Dubai Press Club and the Oxford Business Group squarely characterized the inception of Syria’s private media through the language of economic growth potential and the opening of new markets.⁵

In an April 2010 article for Gulf News, the editor of the privately owned Syrian magazine Forward Sami Moubayed wrote on the prospects of private media in Syria.⁶ He interviewed a private-sector journalist who said, “Private media in Syria – and especially business journalism – is going through a golden era, thanks to the economic reforms under way.” This quote set the tone for the article in its recognition of economic reform rather than media reform as the source of Syria’s flourishing private media. In this way, the benefits of the private sector are assessed not by its groundbreaking news coverage, but by the number of private publications on the market – 165 – and how these publications’ subject matter ranges from luxury to entertainment.

Constructing development and progress in al-Watan

As transformations in the Syrian media and economy have been blurred in both academic literature and news coverage, with excessive reliance on ownership as the primary characteristic, there has been little contextual analysis of the Syrian private media. Furthermore, both Western and Syrian sources have been too eager to discuss Syrian media privatization through an arbitrary framework of development that prizes economic privatization as a step toward progress.

Over five months in 2010, I looked at the economic content of Syria’s only “political” privately owned daily newspaper, al-Watan, to determine some of the distinguishing trends in discourse and coverage.⁷ Though there were numerous findings, I will discuss the one issue that pervaded nearly every economy-related news story: development.

The term development is highly problematic to say the least, yet al-Watan represents a unique space for the purveyance of development discourse. As a privately owned media outlet in a regime-defined “social-market” economy, it operates as both a symbol for Syria’s latest economic opening and a continuity with certain pre-2000 socialist ideals. It is unquestionable that, though al-Watan’s news coverage represents only a fragment of a larger Syrian discourse on economic development, it presents this discourse in many of its complexities. The central question of this article will be: how does al-Watan shape an overlying concept of “development” in its economic coverage and how does its private ownership status affect this conception?