Dubai Television

When Dubai TV was first launched in 1969 it used to open in the morning and put up the schedule for the day which consisted of what was going to be viewed in that specific day, the television channel used to view local songs and recorded local television shows and a movie or two by the night time after viewing the news. Additionally, it was almost only men that presented on Dubai television during the news, and at night it closes and the same thing happens in the next days. It wasn’t as developed as it is now.

During the mid 1970s the trial of colored television started and it was successful after a few months of trying. The Dubai television station was officially launched in 1974 on the 2nd of December by his highness Sheikh Rashed Bin Saeed Al Maktoum. Even though it wasn’t the only colored television channel, it competed with other television channels, they increased the number of advertisements viewed on the channel to attract the largest number of viewers possible. Four years later, Dubai TV launched Channel 33, which was the first English channel in the country.

Television

At that time, only the rich families could own a television set in the UAE, others used to just sit around at a coffee shop or at the “Majlis” where all the men gather and watch it together. This incident happened a few years ago when I was at my great aunt’s house, we were all together then the news came on Dubai TV, the news presenter was a local man. So suddenly, my great aunt freaks out and asks her grandchildren to cover her up because the news presenter is going to see her. Maybe this is not how people were before, maybe it’s just because she is old, but to them at that time, the television was one of the weirdest inventions because it was just a box with a screen.
It was so hard for people to get reception because the TV signals were only from two stations. One station was Al Kuwait television, it was donated by them to the United Arab Emirates between the 1960s and the 1970s. They started viewing Kuwaiti television shows and some songs and also a couple of foreign movies. The other television station that provided the reception was ARAMCO, which was also the oil company. After that, they started producing local talk shows which encouraged more people to join the media.

Newspapers then & now

Between the 1940s and the 1950s, there was a known man from Al Ain, Musabah bin Obaid Al Daheri, who used to gather news from local people who lived there as well. He started writing news he received on bags, and then posts it on the walls of his coffee shop for his customers to read when they come. This newspaper was called “ Jaredat Al Nakhay”. For that time, this paper had a lot of content compared to others, it was mostly because the stories came from the people themselves. It consisted of stories that were normally posted in other daily newspapers such as accidents, crimes, births, deaths and marriages, travel, news about rulers and what they have been doing. This was different for the people of the country, so then people started wanting to read about more news whether it was local or not, it was something that caught their interest.

Almost two decades later, in 1969 people have become more literate so the government used journalism to encourage people to read even more and be more united , this is when the newspaper “Al Ittihad” was published in Abu Dhabi two years before the emirates were united and still remains till today. “Al Ittihad” means unity, even though this happened before the emirates were united, it shows that Sheikh Zayed did want to bring the seven emirates together, he had that vision already and wanted to make it happen.



When newspapers came out, some of them were printed in Kuwait and Beirut because printing was too expensive so they couldn’t set up a printing press in the United Arab Emirates, and they were sent all the way to the United Arab Emirates through Egypt and Baghdad, it was a long journey so people received old news, but because of the high illiteracy rate, it wasn’t useful for a lot of people to get news like the radio. However, this made people want to learn how to read since the content of the papers were topics that interested the people at that time.

The first print of Al Ittihad newspaper, and one of the current ones:

Just an idea about how it used to be

Before the media came out, people used to sit with each other and tell stories. Either true or fake but they had a meaning to them. There were morals to those stories, and they were told by the oldest members of the tribe or neighborhood. There weren’t a lot of people like they are now, so even if the method of spreading news and thoughts were different but it did manage to get to a lot of families. Families were closer than they are now, and people used to see each other more often, that also helped in spreading the news faster. People lived in smaller houses and back then Dubai was just a small town and the citizens knew almost everything about everyone. Life did seem to be simpler back then but they didn’t know a lot about what was happening out of the UAE and also being colonized by Britain, it was hard to get news about other countries easily because everything was watched.