Broadcasters hit home straight
Tang Yuankai

THE most critical information we are keen on delivering is that everything is going well, said Sun Weijia, Director of the Media Operations Department of the Organizing Committee of 2008 Beijing Olympic Games on the eve of the 2007 World Broadcasters Conference.
The conference, which took place from September 23-29, is the last one before the Beijing Olympic Games, thus ushering in a final spurt for preparations for broadcasting of the Beijing Olympics and Paralympics, Sun pointed out.
It’s television that fuelled interest in the Olympics and has sustained it for so long, said former President of the International Olympic Committee Samaranch. Television broadcasting and sponsorship have been dubbed as the major two financial pillars of the modern Olympics.
The past two world broadcaster conferences in 2005 and 2006 placed emphasis on work plans and range of services, while this year it delves into the implementation of the plans. The Organizing Committee of the Beijing Olympics has reported a satisfactory result in implementing plans, added Sun.
The Beijing Olympic Committee and concerned governmental organizations have co-established the Olympic Broadcasting Committee, responsible for affairs concerning broadcasters, such as entering or leaving the country, customs, taxation and work permits. Through its work it aims to build a sound work environment in line with Olympic practices and in pursuant of the requirements of international broadcasting institutions.
The building of an international press center for the Olympics is on track, with major construction already completed and interior installation underway. The press center resembles an exhibition center, and the installation is designed to turn it into a press center in accordance with Olympic reporting requirements. The press center is scheduled to come into use in February 2008, said Sun. Beijing Olympic Broadcasting Co. Ltd. (BOB), a major broadcaster of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, will begin to set up work area for itself and other broadcasters in October 2007. It will be finished by February 2008.
Companies similar to BOB were established for recent Olympic Games by the host cities. Apart from building and running the international broadcasting center and facilities in other arenas and servicing rights-holding broadcasters, BOB also provides television and radio signals for Olympic events and activities.
Radio signals, supplied by the Organizing Committee of Olympics to every country, will be of the highest quality. Rights-holding television and radio stations will broadcast the signals after processing.
The Organizing Committee of the Olympics requires broadcasters to present audiences not only with the sense of being present, but also with a feeling of comfort. “It’s an explicit target of broadcasting that watching the Olympics on television should be a treat, an experience different from attending the arena,” said Ma Guoli, Chief Operation Officer (COO) of BOB. “Broadcasters should take into account all things that audiences wish to watch to minimize what they miss.”
According to forecasts by AGB Nielson, a worldwide media research company, viewers of the Beijing Olympics will top 4 billion, a new high from 3.9 billion viewers of the Athens Olympic Games. Beijing will also see a gathering of 16,000 broadcasters from over 200 rights-holding broadcasting institutions, a record in Olympic history.
Since the 1992 Barcelona Olympic Games, the mode of making public signals for Olympic broadcasting has been shifted from relying on the host country to multinational cooperation. BOB has invited some Chinese broadcasting institutions, including CCTV and BTV to assume the responsibility for the international public signals of seven events in 19 arenas, including table tennis, badminton, modern pentathlon, football, basketball, volleyball and tennis. This is also the first specified team of Beijing Olympic broadcasters and the first large-scale participation of Chinese television media in Olympic broadcasting.
“The homeland broadcasting production scale will not be easily surpassed in future Olympic Games,” commented Yiannis Exarchos, 41-year-old Senior Executive Officer of BOB. Before that, CCTV was in charge of international public signals for the table tennis and badminton events at the 2004 Athens Olympic Games, the first time that China’s television media had participated in international signal production.
“Olympic broadcasting will leave a great legacy for China,” said Yiannis. It not only refers to the broadcasting technology per se, but also includes the production system of creative audio and visual products. Veteran television top gun Yiannis, who was involved in broadcasting work for the Olympic Games in Athens, Sydney and Salt Lake City, cited Greece as an example to illustrate his opinion. Greeks are creative in visual products but their television industry lacks an efficient cooperation system. The situation has been greatly changed since the Olympic Games came in. In this regard, China’s television industry is also expected to benefit from the broadcasting experience.
Yannis thought highly of a project that will see around a thousand college graduates involved in the broadcasting for training purposes. “This is of great significance to China. The youth will have the chance to work with the best broadcasting staff, and they might take the Olympic broadcasting as the start of their future careers.”
“For a long time China’s sports television program production has remained at a low level,” confessed Ma. Before becoming COO of BOB, he was director of the CCTV sports center and learned much about the business.
In the past when China’s economic condition was not so good, the television signal producers in China were under-financed and poorly equipped. But in recent years things have got much better. “However, the quality of television signals leaves much to be desired, mainly because our standard is lower. But it’s surely an improvement for China given its participation in the high standard of signal production in the Olympic Games,” Ma noted.
Ma held that the Games will alter the attitude of Chinese television producers toward increasing investment. “Chinese television production will benefit from the high standards of the international television industry,” said Ma.
Next year’s Beijing Games will be a milestone in Olympic history: BOB will for the first time broadcast 3,800 hours of high definition television signals to the world. “It will be a turning point as important as the transformation from black-and-white television to colored television,” Ma said proudly, adding that the high definition signals can be converted into standard definition signals.

(The Daily Mail-Beijing Review Articles Exchange Item)

Changing profile of Mideast
Dr Eckart Woretz

FROM Afghanistan and Pakistan to Iraq, the Palestinian Territories and Sudan, the wider Middle East has become a synonym for excessive political violence ranging from suicide bombings against innocent civilians to mafia-like shoot outs between competing warlords. It is common in the Middle East to attribute these phenomena to foreign occupation and outside conspiracies, while voices in the west equally tend to seek the culprit elsewhere, blaming an allegedly violent nature of Islam or perceived ethnic rivalries since times immemorial. Yet, a simple fact usually goes unnoticed: It is mostly angry, young men between 16 and 30 who blow themselves up, and the Middle Eastern countries where political violence is widespread have a remarkably high percentage of this age group in their populations.
Fertility rates in Middle Eastern countries have declined considerably over the last three decades from around seven children per woman to less than three in many cases. However, they are still high in Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Palestinian Territories, Yemen, Iraq, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Oman and Syria, where they mostly range between four and six children per woman, with Yemen and Afghanistan registering even higher numbers with 6.7 and 8. In other countries like Iran, the fertility rate plummeted in the 1990s and is now at 2.1 children per woman, the replacement rate of a given population and about a third of what it used to be less than 30 years ago. The same is true for Tunisia, Algeria, Turkey and Lebanon which show fertility rates pretty similar to aging OECD countries.
With the time lag of a generation, declining fertility rates lead to a diminishing share of youths among the population. The so-called youth bulge, which marks a high percentage of youths (age 15-24) as a share of the adult population (15-64), has peaked around 2000 in countries like Syria and Iran. In the case of most low fertility countries, this has been the case already in the 1980s and 1990s. As many of the youths of today and tomorrow were born in the more fertile 1980s and 1990s, and as the percentage of children under 15 as a share of the total population is still high in comparison with other world regions, it will take time for the pressure of youth bulges and new entrants in the labour market to abate. Associated youth bulges in high fertility countries will only peak over the next 20 years and then peter out if the trend of declining fertility rates continues.
A youth bulge is not just a simple statistical incident; behind it are aspiring young people jockeying for positions while facing a lack of upward mobility as their numbers are high in comparison to the overall adult population. Research by Gunnar Heinsohn, Henrik Urdal and others has shown that youth bulges are associated with an increase in the likelihood of domestic political violence. Coupled with tertiary education, the risk increases further as it is not Malthusian wretched of the earth who are engaging in the political violence but often well educated and dynamic youths in pursuit of positions they cannot get. Alienated or competing elites, deteriorating economic conditions, weak political institutions and ecological degradation constitute further risk factors. Youth bulge pressure can be reduced by migration as the European colonisation of the Americas between the 16th and 19th century has shown. It was the mass of second and third born sons with no right to inherit who ventured abroad for lack of alternatives at home. Europe at that time commanded similar birth rates as high fertility countries used to do until recently. This example also shows the risk of international repercussions; governments of the affected countries can be tempted to deviate some of the youth bulge pressure to other countries via expansive foreign policies as Europe did in the mentioned period.
Does that mean that political, social and cultural factors do not contribute to political violence? Absolutely not; certainly foreign interference and occupation is widespread in the Middle East since western powers competed for the spoils of the declining Ottoman Empire, and oil became a strategic commodity on the eve of World War I. Too weak to defend their sovereignty but strong enough to carve out rooms to manoeuvre, Middle Eastern states have constituted a “penetrated system” (Carl Brown) since then with peculiar forms of interaction between the international, regional and local level that have benefited the occurrence of political violence. Finally, the emergence of a nihilistic cult of martyrdom and suicide bombings in the Islamic world and a lack of decisive response by moderate forces in the inner-Islamic debate has been an important factor in rising levels of domestic political violence.—Khaleej Times




On the dynamism of Parliamentary elections
Ahmad Y. Majdoubeh

ARE our parliamentary elections dynamic? Are they vibrant? Most probably they are partly so, but largely static. This explains why some people in our society are enthusiastic about voting, while many are not. Democracy, generally speaking as well as in the case of our society, appears to be a necessity. It is true that democracy, generally, is far from perfect, as it does have many shortcomings and even vices. But it seems to be one of the very few options that actually work in real life.
Democracy, represented by parliamentary life as well as other aspects and dimensions, is a very positive development in our society: it does give activists a legitimate (as opposed to underground) venue through which they can express their opinions, and parliament does debate and legislate important, at times crucial, issues. Nevertheless, I have the following remark to make about democracy and parliamentary elections in our society.
One is not ultimately sure whether the system of democracy or that of consensus works best for our society. Socially, politically, economy wise and in many other spheres, most matters, differences, frictions and disputes in our part of the world are addressed or solved not through majority votes, but through consensus. The parties at odds, and this applies to all situations in all contexts, sit down, in the presence of referees or notables, express their points, vent their anger, scream, threaten, debate, argue, disagree, and then calm down, agree and accept. Each has to make a compromise, and the extremists on both sides (those who feel most affected or injured) end up agreeing. Forgiveness, tolerance and a degree of love prevail. And matters are settled once and for all.
This is not what happens in democracy. In democracy, 49 per cent can be dissatisfied upon voting. They do end up accepting the decision, but not entirely convinced. And they may keep trying to reverse the vote, through a variety of democratic venues. The acceptance, which is never complete, is only momentary. In other words, vibrant, dynamic democracies thrive, it seems to me, on differences and oppositions. Therefore, the strongest (and thus most dynamic and vibrant) democracies worldwide are those in which political parties are most at odds, and remain at odds over time: the Democrats and Republicans in America, the Conservatives and Labour in Britain, etc.
In our situation, and with respect to political parties, we are different - and radically so. Aside from the Islamists, who hold strong view on many matters (and these are often views which do not appeal to the majority of citizens), and aside from some individual, disparate candidates from outside the Islamist groups, who also hold strong views on issues, our political parties are not issue oriented. Not only do we have too many political parties (mini ones, in fact), but also these parties do not differ on issues of major concern to the constituents.
This is why if you look at the slogans of most of our candidates, they are very similar. All talk about freedoms, the environment, women’s rights, Jordan for all, children’s rights. In other words, you cannot (aside from the two exceptions mentioned above, and women candidates perhaps) distinguish among parties on the basis of their slogans.—Jordan Times