Across differences in history and culture, it is compelling states to establish their authority less and less on coercion and more and more on social consensus. It is believed that the sense making of public diplomacy would not only create a more participatory political systems region, but also establish new communication platforms that can overcome the current coercive governments and help marginalize the growing sense of Occidentalism. Indeed, the Academic Council on the United Nations System has not given enough emphasis on this issue before through such new field of sense making the ACUNS can have an unprecedented opportunity now to help build a better and more democratic world with the spread of information and technology that challenges tyrants who seek to stifle the message of freedom. Sense-Making assumes that dialogue pertains specifically to the presence of difference to enable communication. Sense-Making, however, acknowledges the potential of such difference to bridge any such “global” moment. Surveying the various procedures humans use to “discipline” dialogue of who, where, and when of talking, who gets to speak, when, for how long, and where. Germany’s and France’s International Satellite TV Broadcasters DEUTSCHE WELLE and FRANCE 24 not only report about their respective countries, but also about their target regions which are usually torn by crisis and conflict with no freedom of opinion and the press. Their Arabic TV Services are considered to be of the most recent Free to Air (FTA) channels that attempt to use the current TV culture to engage, inform, and influence Arab audiences. Such soft power tools are a revitalization of public diplomacy tools “to win the hearts and minds” of the Arab/Muslim people with the aim promoting dialogue. “The sense-making’s theory of dialogue” is theoretical framework of this research that attempts to stipulate a meta-theorized strategy that addresses “connection”, “content” and “contest”.
The main research question is how do Egypt publics perceive the discourses of both European channels, and what material-interpretive conditions might help improve the public’s understanding of the message. In that attempts, queries related to time, space, movement, gap, power, constraint, force, flexibility, and inflexibility must be answered. Since audience research in the Arab world – and, even more important, reliable instruments, methods, and standards of comparative audience research between the Arab and the Western worlds – are seriously lacking so far, this pioneer study is actually a pilot study conducted by The Arab-European Media Observatory. It offers an unprecedented research on the sense-making of DEUTSCHE WELLE and FRANCE 24 in the Arab streets, especially in Egypt to start with. This study explores the public’s agenda with regards to importance, role, and level of success of both channels. It also attempts to answer vital questions of discourses such as level of satisfaction, credibility, content comprehensibility, sufficiency, and effectiveness. Methodologically, this study is of explorative nature and conducts qualitative in-depth interviews, surveying a population of two interrelated samples: the first sample consists of media professionals; the second sample consists of media university students. The research population has a purposive non-probability nature that helps give clues and indications of the degree of awareness of Egyptian publics and assess their perception of the quality of performance of DEUTSCHE WELLE and FRANCE 24. In this stage, Egyptians are cross-examined. But in later stages of the project, viewers from other Middle East and North African states (MENA) will be also researched. At a time, when many Western countries attempt to address and target Arab/Muslim audiences through public diplomacy, it has become crucial to properly investigate and analyze the cause-effect relationship between what and why viewers’ habits. The research follows the model of RACE (Research-Action-Communication-Evaluation) to “sense-make” DEUTSCHE WELLE’s and FRANCE 24’s potentials and challenges. It is only then, one could assess the two channels’ performance based on empirical evidence relying on observation and explanation of events in retrospect.
