The Plight of Moroccan TV

This past Ramadan Moroccan viewers inside the kingdom and abroad were fuming over the mediocre Moroccan drama series and comedies that crowded their TV screens around Iftar time, the time of breaking the fast. Iftar time is equivalent to American Super Bowl spread out over thirty days in terms of peaking TV viewership and ad revenues. Moroccan Facebookers created several groups to protest against 2M TV and Al-Oula TV, both state-run TV channels. Moroccan press, too, lashed out at the two channels, and Rachid Jadir, a young underground cartoon artist, came up with a short, but quite funny, video clip --which made the rounds on Facebook-- mocking the Moroccan TV mockery. Al-Jazeera TV also chipped in and discussed the issue on its daily Maghreb special edition for about 30 minutes.

Experts claimed several factors that contribute to the poor quality of TV programming:

1. Political: Few months ago, the Audio-visual watchdog in Morocco, HACA, canceled a invitation for proposal to the private sector for 2 TV projects and 3 radio stations permits. It was canceled at the last minute, citing the difficult market conditions caused by the global financial meltdown, which might, they argued, depress an already suffering TV ads market. But some observers said it highlighted the authorities reluctance to allow privately-owned networks to operate. This kind of TV channels will need to attract viewers to survive, which might lead them to discuss taboo topics in Morocco, particularly in a country with high illiteracy rate, and where citizens hardly read to know what is going on in the country. That is more headaches for the authorities, which have been butting heads with the Moroccan printed press lately. This, observers argue, creates, or rather, maintains an audiovisual environment monopolized by two state-owned TV networks.
2. Advertisers: Advertisers are rumored to have a major say on what shows the two channels should air. From the dozens of proposals for shows and series, the advertisers prefer to conservatively pick the familiar faces in the Moroccan comedy scene as a safe bet. The underfunded SNRTs two outlets have no choice but to say yes to advertisers so that they can balance their budgets with high premiums they charge for the much prized Iftar peak time. Projects proposed by young and unfamiliar artists get the boot and the Moroccan audience never gets to discover new talents, leading to very uncompetitive and incompetent products by the same old faces.
3. Nepotism and corruption: Those same old faces have now accumulated fortunes thanks to their exclusive contracts obtained through shady and murky contacts. Actors and producers like Said Naciri, for example, appear every year on 2M TV and fail miserably to put not even a smile on the viewers' faces, let alone laughter. Inflated contracts charges end up in the pockets of the "artists" and TV artistic evaluation teams. Of course, the two networks, run by bureaucrats, will never reform themselves as feedback, instructions, and orders go one-way street, from top to bottom.
   

Backfire:
Things have changed this year. With tools like Facebook, the Moroccan blogosphere and Twitter, feedback to Ramadan programming was immediate, and negative. The press and the advertisers themselves, for the first time in the history of Moroccan media enviornment, were able to measure the viewers' temperature. Newspapers bombarded the two networks with a daily barrage of criticism. And the advertisers, 10 days into Ramadan, pulled most of their advertising. Viewers of course had no shortage of alternative shows and networks to follow, as they zapped to Egyptian, Saudi, and Lebanese networks for Syrian and Egyptian drama. Quite anecdotal was the fact that many disappointed viewers turned to Hizballah's Al-Manar TV to watch a of a drama series that was said to be of higher quality than what the Moroccan networks aired. Too much for a regime that declared war on Shiism in Morocco few months ago.