How you get your media in the United Arab Emirates depends on where you spend most of your time. For those that spend a fair amount of their day at fixed work location, the internet & social media constitute a broad swath of their news & events diet. Those who spend ample time on the road, which means either those plying their trade in the transportation field or an underemployed local joy driver, then radio becomes the dominant media disseminator. A third large, but shrinking segment of the Emirate population watches the ever re-fashioning television spectrum.
Online programs and Facebook style platforms are the newsfeeds of choice for the constantly connected resident of the Emirates. Many of those interested in the gossip of the their social media 鈥渇riends鈥� might have little interest for true journalistic news reports but the two genres are everyday merging so that one viewer鈥檚 salacious blather is another website鈥檚 breaking 鈥渘ews鈥� feature. The viewing & reading public are increasingly unaware of the distinction between the two. One thing they have in common is that these viewers have either grown up unattached from TV & radio or they鈥檝e grown to dismiss them in favor of the eye & candy of online broadcasting. Popular viewing for this segment includes the aforementioned, all too ubiquitous Facebook & to a lesser extent its sister slates, i.e. twitter & Instagram.
The radio listening public is beholden to the few plastic knobs & buttons they can navigate on an often crowded & increasingly complicated dashboard.聽 Transport workers, including the legions of foreign workers in the taxi business spend enormous amounts of hours listening to a variety of special interest programs ranging from Hindi-Pak talk programs, to Arabic soccer matches to Bollywood music channels, bookended by a number of Western music programs DJ鈥檈d by sons & daughters of expats who鈥檝e called the UAE home since birth but are rarely elevated to the status of true Emirati nationals. Thus both listeners & content promoters keep the flavor of the radio fare to a mild seasoning cognizant they are not & may never be permanent residents, much less nationals, of the UAE.
The third group, TV viewers, are an amalgam of the families that adhere to more traditional home values, elderly who鈥檝e resisted melting into the internet media pot, and travelers watching a few segments from a hotel room. The types of shows are tame by any measure but certainly bland compared to US or UK TV programming. One feature that sets the TV industry apart from Western outlets is the variety of foreign language content. There鈥檚 plenty of Arabic programming of course, which technically can鈥檛 be classed as foreign but has been relegated to minority language status owing its secondary position in terms of spoken languages in UAE (3rd perhap, as many Indians & other expats have adopted English as the common medium of communication). Then there鈥檚 the steady number of Slavic language visitors who鈥檝e prompted satellite TV providers to air Russian language news and music programs. Confession: I watch this programming a lot owing to my personal interests as a student of Russian language & culture. And while much of the programming seems a parody of Western media, including the MTV style 鈥淩ussian Music Box鈥�, many of the programs are worthy rivals to their prime-time US counterparts.
It鈥檚 a truly eclectic media smorgasbord here in the UAE, advanced by the myriad of language groups, different in so many ways yet sharing a yearning for being connected to their cultures by any medium possible.
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