Keeping up with the news in the United Arab Emirates

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 “friends” might have little interest for true journalistic news reports but the two genres are everyday merging so that one viewer's salacious blather is another website's breaking “news” 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've 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.  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'ed by sons & daughters of expats who've 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've 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's plenty of Arabic programming of course, which technically can't 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's the steady number of Slavic language visitors who've 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 “Russian Music Box”, many of the programs are worthy rivals to their prime-time US counterparts.

It's 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.