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About halfway through a press conference in Amman last July convened to announce the launch of ATV, Jordan’s first privately owned satellite television station, an assistant passed the station’s head, Mohannad Khatib, a note. “They took our signal off the air,” it read.
After two years spent negotiating the licenses, working around government interference, securing millions of dollars in financing, and constructing an enormous headquarters in Amman, the government had pulled the plug. Khatib was furious. When the press conference ended, he rushed back to his office and tuned in to the station. The screen was blank. ATV had become the latest casualty in the losing battle for media freedom in Jordan.
“Government” in Jordan does not function in the way Americans understand the term. A monarchy led by King Abdullah, known in the U.S. for his fluent English and media savvy, presents the appearance of being above the fray of a lively local political scene. This image is enhanced by the Bush administration’s regular praise of Jordan as an evolving democracy. Yet meaningful political debate is neutralized by the ubiquitous intelligence services, which prop up weak government institutions subservient to the monarchy. In Arab countries, including Jordan, the intelligence service, the mukhabarat, often counts among the most efficient national institutions. Because the mukhabarat operates in the shadows of the government, it can seem invisible to the unaccustomed eye. But it’s there. And while the Jordanian government characterizes local media as enjoying wide latitude in covering the news, the mukhabarat is actively working to undermine them.
Its most efficient tools are fear and self-censorship. The mukhabarat functions alongside, behind, above, and sometimes instead of traditional law enforcement, depending on the situation. Most people do not want to get entangled with the shadowy agency, whose buildings remain unmarked and whose agents show no identification. This means not saying or doing anything in public that could be construed as critical of the monarchy, military, or mukhabarat. While King Abdullah and his surrogates speak of media for which “the sky is the limit,” the rhetoric is far from the reality.
I know this from the inside, having worked for a Jordanian newspaper, a Jordan-based magazine, and a Jordanian television production house. In those jobs, I found that one assumes informants are always watching and listening. I’ve had my phone connection cut several times while filing live for radio, always while discussing internal Jordanian politics. Journalists talk on the phone to each other in code to avoid using sensitive words (“king,” “Al Qaeda,” “mukhabarat”) that draw unwanted attention. A persistent rumor abounds that sophisticated eavesdropping equipment tracks every conversation in a popular hotel lobby café where journalists meet for coffee. Who knows whether it’s true, but people believe it to be possible. In fact, it is easy to become paranoid, imagining that everyone is an informer, from the coffee boy who lingers a little too long in the newsroom to the correspondent who suddenly shifts from a critical stance of the government to a more favorable one. Have they been co-opted? It’s not uncommon for the mukhabarat to approach journalists and offer any number of benefits.
But they usually do not have to go that far. Journalism in Jordan comes with an expectation of compliance. When I edited the national news section of The Jordan Times in 2001 and 2002, I was often handed long press releases describing Queen Raina’s visit to a high school or orphanage that had to be printed unedited, along with pictures, as lead stories. Thousands of words praising King Abdullah’s directives to clean up a hospital or build housing for the poor, or his attempts to assist beleaguered Palestinian officials, would also run unedited—straight from the palace to the pages of the newspaper. Minor royals sent in their own press releases detailing their charitable efforts, with the full expectation that they, too, would be printed. The job was enormously frustrating, but challenging its limits would be met with a you-know-better look. And I did know better, even though no one ever told me directly exactly where the line was. Some things you just don’t do, and at some point, you stop asking why.
One potentially bright spot in a desolate scene is AmmonNews, a Web site whose readers sometimes also serve as sources. Basil Okoor, the thirty-four-year-old founder, works from an Amman café, where he drinks tea with visitors and puffs on a water pipe as he posts several news items a day via laptop. Since Okoor set up the site in 2006, the government has twice blocked access to it in Jordan. “They thought that at some point we might become a threat,” he says. “They” is the mukhabarat. After an outcry among the normally tame media, as well as behind-the-scenes networking to assure the government it wasn’t a threat, AmmonNews regained access to Jordanian servers. Still, last September, the government announced that Jordan’s Press and Publications Law, notorious among journalists, would apply to Web sites. The law makes it a crime to publish or broadcast anything “harmful to the armed forces or security organs,” or that “encourages perversion or leads to moral corruption,” or “contains false information or rumors,” along with more than a dozen other ambiguous criteria. It is rarely enforced. Self-censorship, co-option, and a close eye on media decision-makers mean few prosecutions are necessary.
The result: a product devoid of credibility and substance. A typical front-page, top-of-the-fold headline from The Jordan Times might look something like what was published last November 7: coming stage crucial—king. The lead offers precious little information: “His Majesty King Abdullah has stressed that the coming stage is crucial at various levels,” and then goes on to mention a coming era of “implementation and actual achievement regarding programs and plans that have matured.” The awkward English is a direct translation from the original Arabic published by Petra, the official news agency, and included in the country’s most popular official and unofficial newspapers.
A Jordanian government official acknowledges that “there is fear” among journalists, but says “the leadership of that place”—meaning the mukhabarat—“is more enlightened and much more open to the media than any other I have known.” It doesn’t look that way to everyone: for the third year in a row, Jordan’s ranking has dropped in the international index of press freedoms as tabulated by Reporters Without Borders, to 122 out of 169 surveyed countries in 2007. The group’s annual report on Jordan states that “local journalists are closely watched by the country’s intelligence services.”
This is a lesson that the owners of ATV learned the hard way, after being promised that the highest echelons in Jordan supported the new channel. “I think the main problem was that the project was ‘managed’ by the mukhabarat,” says a source inside ATV who refused to be named. The source also said that members of the mukhabarat would regularly call in senior management of the new station to its media-affairs office to discuss specific matters of content, staff choices, and budgets—information they could have received only from inside the station.
In what is widely interpreted as a government takeover at ATV, two lawyers working for the law firm owned by the current minister of justice somehow came up with at least $15 million to purchase the station last September. It is not clear how they obtained these funds, and no investigation into the matter has appeared in the media. No new launch date has been announced. If ATV does relaunch, it will do so without the leadership of Mohannad Khatib, who says he resigned after the new management sidelined him. He is now an anchor at the new Future News channel in Beirut, part of the media empire owned by the family of Rafiq Hariri, the assassinated Lebanese prime minister. “I felt that the project was no longer the same as it was when I joined,” Khatib says. What could have been, will never be, as long as the mukhabarat interferes in the smallest details of any media endeavor in Jordan. Khatib says, “You can’t be creative when you keep worrying about the consequences of every word you say.”
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