Fresh Global Media Players: Redistributing Media Power?

In news and entertainment, the production, circulation and consumption of media have seen tremendous qualitative and quantitative changes. For example, Turkish TV series circle the globe, Qatar-based news and sports channels are viewed worldwide, and Hollywood films are produced with 'Middle Eastern' budgets. Yet much research on global media restricts itself to developments in the US and the EU, whereas the Arab region and the ‘Middle East’ are more often out of frame. To date, the discussions of these changes that do include the MENA or Arab Gulf regions have been overly dominated by debates framed around ‘media imperialism’ and ‘de-westernization,’ terms that continue to assume Western hegemony as the status quo. Moving beyond these imbalances and shibboleths, the conference will convene selected top specialists in global media to exchange their research findings and theoretical approaches regarding the change of industry practices, to further develop strategies for their effective analysis, and to strengthen transnational research collaboration in this arena. In sum, the goals of the conference are: to highlight emerging pathways for researching and understanding the new global media organizations, their/its messages and impact; and to initiate a fruitful exchange of expertise among global media scholars, Qatar-based professional media institutions, and students. Hosted in Qatar, the conference echoes the country’s growing engagement with global media industries. The conference will bring together in Doha a select group of ten high-level media researchers and experts from Qatar and other international locations, over a period of three days. Initially the invitees will exchange detailed presentations regarding specific key dimensions of current media power redistribution in the global South, and intensively debate them. On the second day, a keynote speech by a leading global media executive will frame the issues from an industry perspective focusing on challenges and opportunities for fresh media institutions. On the third day, in a session open to Education City and the community at large, spokespeople from selected Qatar media projects will address their current goals and challenges. A theme issue of an international media research journal and a conference report will be arranged for edited versions of the presentations, including a summary of the Qatar media projects’ presentations.