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April 15, 2004
Egyptian group to launch Iraq's first private national TV - Hawa (BBC Monitoring World Media)
A licence has been granted allowing an Egyptian consortium to launch the first privately owned national TV station in Iraq on 15 June, Al-Jazeera and the Associated Press reported on 13 April.
The Arabic-language TV station will be called Hawa, (meaning "air"). It will start by broadcasting six hours of news and entertainment programmes daily before going 24/7, said Hasan Abu al-Ala, the station's deputy manager and editor-in-chief.
Egyptian investor Najib Sawiris, whose Orascom Telecom company heads the consortium, and Video Cairo Sat, an independent Egyptian news provider, plan to invest 25m dollars in the new channel.
Muhammad Juhar, chairman of Video Cairo Sat, told Al-Jazeera that the consortium spent over four months negotiating with the US-backed Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) to grant them a licence.
"The Iraqis were wary to grant such permission to a foreign company, and the Americans were worried about our independence," he said. "But with the veteran journalists we have, we convinced them that we are objective and not taking a line against anybody."
"We are neither with nor against anyone. Our main objective is to entertain Iraqis and deliver information objectively," he said. "We want to encourage them (Iraqis) to coexist peacefully and ... renounce violence."
Credibility questioned
However, critics say the Hawa channel will struggle to gain independent credibility, as its broadcast licence comes from the US-backed CPA.
"If Sawiris had any political awareness, he would have never done this," Hasan Nafaa, head of political science at Cairo University, told Al-Jazeera. "The American ruler has the final say in all matters in Iraq, including media, and this is enough to affect the credibility of the station."
The Iraq Communications and Media Commission, set up on 24 March by US administrator Paul Bremer, has yet to announce the result of more than 60 applications which have been submitted for licences to set up TV and radio stations in the country.
"It will be interesting to see Hawa operate freely with the Americans controlling everything," Jalaa Jad Allah, an editor at Egypt's state-owned Al-Jumhuriyah newspaper, told Al-Jazeera.
But Abu al-Ala, a former BBC Arabic Service senior executive and an experienced broadcaster, insisted the new station has no political agenda, pledging an "objective editorial policy as we are not with or against anybody".
To start with, Hawa will operate terrestrially before possibly being transmitted via satellite.
"Our broadcast will be terrestrial only for about six months, and then we will decide if we will go on satellite," said Muhammad Juhar.
Newsgathering will be supplied from four bureaux across Iraq, along with offices in Cairo, Jerusalem and Washington. A team of 240 people will be employed in Baghdad.
According to Juhar, the Iraq-based bureaux will rely heavily on local experience but will also employ other Arab nationalities.
Competition
The new channel will be competing directly with the pan-Arab and foreign satellite TV broadcasts which Iraqis currently turn to as reliable sources of news.
Al-Iraqiyah, the CPA-funded main terrestrial TV station in Baghdad, has attracted few viewers with its news coverage, which many Iraqis perceive as poor. At least two other new satellite channels aimed at Iraqi viewers - Al-Sharqiya and Al-Diyar, run by Iraqi media tycoons Sa'd al-Bazzaz and Faysal al-Yasiri - are due to start transmission soon.
But with no commercial market yet to sustain a private media sector, aspiring media tycoons in Iraq will have to have deep pockets and be prepared for a long wait to see returns on their investments.
Posted by Vanessa Hetherington on April 15, 2004 at 11:28 AM in Middle East media, New television | Permalink
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