About the speaker:

George Hawatmeh is currently the Chairman of the Board of Jordan Radio and Television Corporation. Before his appointment to head the state-owned JRTVC in June 2016, he was an independent communications and media consultant. In this capacity, and as president of AWAN, Arab Media Consultants, a firm he founded in 2007, Hawatmeh publishes three Arabic online news websites and a fourth in English. Since 1998, he also has been working on developing a Web-based encyclopedia on the Arab World.

With a career in journalism that started in 1981, Hawatmeh reported for British newspapers and was editor-in-chief for three Jordanian daily newspapers (Al Ghad, Al Ra'i and the English-language Jordan Times). He also published a monthly magazine specialized in covering media issues in the Arab World. In 2000-2001, he served as director of the Jordan Information Bureau in Washington DC.