Something is terribly wrong with our print media. It seems our newspapers love to sail in a direction directly opposed to the one taken by their readers. Indeed, it is no wonder readers are unhappy with this bump in the relationship. The problem has to do with real estate. In most of our daily newspapers, the kind of back page most often sought by readers has disappeared. In its place we see full and half-page color advertisements, promoting multistoried structures containing luxury flats overlooking the sea and opulent villas surrounded by greenery on all sides. The real estate business has taken over. The old back page that used to carry light news and amusing pictures has now yielded to colored ads promoting mega-projects and carrying statements from, and pictures of, the big businessmen running the show.
For quite sometime now, these huge colored advertisements have been taking up the whole of most of our newspapers’ back pages. The back page is what people turn to for relaxation after a quick glance at the depressing stories on the front page.
No one objects to a newspaper making a profit, but the disappearance of the back page and its surrender to ads is reason for people to be upset. We are talking about a relationship between readers and newspapers that took a long time to develop. The ordinary reader struggles to save a few riyals from an already overstretched budget in order to buy a newspaper, looking for something that refreshes his hopes for a better future or one that provides a useful piece of information or some valuable advice. Feeling saddled with the woes of life, the poor reader then finds his favorite page occupied by the names and pictures of people who promote the kind of fancy projects that can only be approached by them and their ilk — the group with fat wallets and overstuffed bank accounts. And don’t ask how those wallets got fat or those bank accounts became overstuffed! What benefit can a poor citizen, who now has almost no access to the sea and whose only consolation in the newspaper is the back page, gain from all these ads selling what can only be bought by the rich? It is of course all due to the power of the real estate lobby.
