A guttering flame

THIS month Al Arab, a new private Saudi-funded satellite channel, launched in Bahrain with shiny new studios and sparkling ideals. It would, said Jamal Khashoggi, the veteran Saudi journalist appointed to head it, be the “voice of the voiceless”. Not for long. Just six hours after Al Arab first went on air the Gulf statelet gagged it; on February 9th authorities said it must close for good, claiming it was not properly licensed. Its real sin, it seems, was to give airtime to Al Wefaq, Bahrain’s main opposition party.

The short life of Al Arab is emblematic of a wider flowering of independent Arab media, and its subsequent withering. The channel took shape during the heady days of the Arab spring, when autocratic regimes were falling and people yearned for free media. Appetites had been whetted since the early 1990s, with the advent of the internet and satellite TV.