Dr. Hussein AlAhmad, an academician at the Faculty of Graduate Studies at the Arab American University, has launched a new book titled “Consolidating Tyranny: The Political Echo in Arab Satellite News Media,” within the framework of academic books that address Arab conflicts and the media’s impact on them. 

In his book, Dr. AlAhmad presents a critical vision of how Arab satellite media, funded by the governments of rich countries that aspire to play a political role, influences the formation of the political scene, especially in non-democratic environments such as the Palestinian context and the Arab societies that suffer from internal conflicts. The book delves into the challenges these media channels face in the absence of democratic practices and under the weight of financial restrictions that satellite channels need to finance their expensive broadcasts, which leads to transforming their important role into “instrumental” journalism that works in the service of regional agendas, which are linked to the international agenda in the region in order to contribute - even if Unintentionally – to exacerbating existing tensions and ongoing bloody conflicts.

In his book, Dr. AlAhmad managed - by employing the theory of “bargaining power” that he developed in a previous edition - to prove the relationship between external political pressures and the internal policy tracks of weak countries, to shape the content of satellite media in a way that serves the interests of the political forces in the region. The book clearly points out the impact of this on the quality of journalism and its role in deepening political divisions in the Arab world. Thus, the book provides in-depth analytical explanations of the repercussions of these factors on the internal Palestinian conflict as well as other Arab conflicts.

This work is distinguishes by its challenge to prevailing theoretical models and its call to adopt analytical approaches that take into account the specificity of the contexts in which these conflicts take place, providing strong foundations for a deeper understanding of media and political interactions in the Arab world.

This book was published in cooperation with the prestigious British publishing house Palgrave Macmillan as a result of the author’s extensive research efforts in the field of strategic communication.