Media and sectarianism in the Middle East: Saudi hegemony over Pan-Arab media
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Powerful political and economic players allocate significance resources in order to influence the media in ways that advance their interests. This article attempts to reveal the mechanisms that the ruling Saudi family uses to exert its power over pan-Arab media. It argues that Al Saud uses ownership, sponsorship, cooptation and coercion to keep pan-Arab media in line with its policies. It also asserts that the main consequence of Saudi domination of pan-Arab media today is not to divert Arab public opinion away from politics, as was the case in the 1990s; rather it is to set a sectarian agenda as a means to counter Iran’s influence in some Arab countries. Using frame analysis of a representative sample of eight programmes broadcast between 2012 and 2016 by three Salafi TV channels owned and sponsored by Al Saud, the article demonstrates that sponsoring a sectarian agenda may also encourage terrorism. It also reveals frame convergence between the messages of the Salafi channels and that of ISIL. Saudi media policy thus increases the visibility of ISIL’s messages and renders them credible, leading to the expansion of ISIL’s capability for recruitment.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".