The country's largest English- and Arabic language newspapers, Al Khaleej and Gulf News, are privately owned.
By law, the National Media Council, which is appointed by the president, licenses all publications and issues press credentials to editors.
Any offense is prohibited by the government, especially disrespect to regime of the United Arab Emirates, its symbols and the political system, the divine and Islamic beliefs and other religions, and the culture and heritage of the U.A.E.
[4] Nowadays, the United Arab Emirates and mostly Dubai and Abu Dhabi publishes and produces many newspapers of international languages.
Professionals like Ravi Raman, who joined Khaleej Times in 2017 strongly worked on reinventing the revenue model by making newspapers a 360 solution providers.
Though a lot of success was achieved in launching an events and conferences division, the group was slow to react to the changing market dynamics.
[8] The UAE is well served by terrestrial radio with a variety of stations broadcasting in the languages commonly spoken in the country.
Today, independent radio stations in the UAE include 7 in English and 7 in Hindi, 12 Arabic, Malayalam, and one each in Tamil, Tagalog, Russian and Persian.
[10] In 2013, TV View aggregator released figures showing that seven out of the top ten most-watched channels in the UAE were from MBC networks.
(6) In 2014, TNS Global, a market research company, carried out a survey of Emirati viewership, finding that the UAE has one of the highest in the world with 86% of subjects responding that they watched television daily to varying degrees.
[12] In 2003, the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) was established to filter internet content on the basis of Emirati cultural or religious values.
In 2009, the internet forum UAE Hewar was launched and started gaining popularity quickly however the government blocked then closed it down in 2010.
[13] His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum is a great proponent of social media, frequently using different popular outlets to communicate with the public.
[5] In 2015, Google stated that a request was made by the TRA to pull down a YouTube video "depicting an Emirati royal family torturing Sudanese workers".
These guidelines state that a situation wherein a creator blogs or only discusses personal experiences is exempt from regulation, but that any type of promotion or advertising requires a license of approval from the NMC.
[14] Director General of the NMC, Mansour Al-Mansouri states that "[these] new regulations are part of the council’s plan to promote and develop an advanced legislative and regulatory environment for the UAE media sector".
[16][17] In March 2020 following the COVID-19 outbreak, social networking channels and video streaming services, achieved a double-digit growth in the number of users, according to the UAE's telecoms regulator.