Arab journalism and the Covid-19 pandemic: challenges and opportunities

The objective of the current investigation is to compare how the pandemic was covered by various Arab newsrooms across different political and cultural contexts. The research will include AlAhram newspaper in Cairo, LBCI TV in Beirut and Sky News Arabia in Abu Dhabi, which should cover various ends on both the political freedom (Freedom House 2022) and the affluence (World Bank & OECD 2021) spectrums. ُhis study will use a twofold qualitative research strategy. Firstly, semi-structured interviews will be conducted with 10 journalists each from Egypt, Lebanon, and the UAE. Secondly, qualitative content analysis will be another qualitative research method implemented in this study. Content such as editorials, news stories and TV programmes will be analysed to find out the extent to which it was possible to maintain editorial autonomy and diversity of voice. The questions to be addressed here will be:
1- How editorially restricted did journalists find themselves in reporting on Covid-19, and
2- To what extent has their reporting benefit from and move along the digital advances in the industry.
The paper is expected to highlight the profound impact that the COVID-19 pandemic has had on the Arab media industry (Al-Rawi, 2020). The pandemic has brought to light the critical role that media plays in disseminating information and raising public awareness, particularly in times of crisis (Al-Jazeera, 2020). Despite the challenges posed by the pandemic, including a decline in advertising revenue (El Qassim, 2020) and increased competition (El-Nawawy, 2021), Arab media outlets have adapted to the changing circumstances by embracing new technologies and formats (Al-Rawi, 2020). The findings of this paper, once complete, should shed more light on the extent to which reporting on Covid-19 was impacted by the salient issues of editorial independence, diversity of voice and the strife towards digitisation in the region. Based on the above, this project has a strong PhD potential due to there being a gap in research on the specific area of study proposed.