Understanding media in paths of political change: the case of the Arab Spring
By Fatima el Issawi
The ongoing democratic backsliding in the Middle East and North Africa questions the promises brought by the Arab revolts on rights, dignity and a democratic governance in the region. They also give ground to those who argue for an incompatibility between the region and the very notion of democracy. The meagre gains in structural reforms, some of them are mere cosmetic change, empowered a return to a nationalistic discourse that frames change as a danger to the stability, national security and even the national identity. It is not a surprise to see a triumph of the nostalgia of old days, including former dictators, perceived as a safer option, despite their legacies of crimes and human rights violations. The ongoing counterrevolutions are empowered by a vicious use of new media, turned from a tool of liberation to a weapon of indoctrination, disinformation, and surveillance.
This special issue – guest edited by myself and Jonathan Hill- brings a fresh look to these movements of transformation beyond the classic frames of democratization, transition, and autocratic resilience, to enable a more nuanced understanding of the legacy of 10 years of struggle between agency and structures. The series aims to bridge the divide between those structuralists whose focus on regional dynamics of regime change missed the on-the ground shifts and creativity of actors, and those actor-centrists who neglected the importance of key regional dynamics in better explaining these movements’ diverse paths and outcomes. Most importantly, we wanted to shed light on the centrality of media’s role as a full actor in political change, despite being neglected and often downplayed by transition scholars. While a structural reform remains vital in explaining change or lack of it, processes of mediatising conflicts arising from these paths of political change or reforms, and media frames of political discourses are active players in shaping the dynamics and outcomes of these movements. We looked at media practices and their meanings as being inherently political, hybrid and fluid, transformed by unpredictable changes shaking their environment, but also impacting these transformations in many ways, taking into consideration both regional patterns of behaviour and country-specific dynamics.
The issue aims to provide a nuanced and fuller understanding of the hybridity of these practices that takes place within a multi-layered and complex media ecology where the notion of power is fluid, volatile, and ever changing, making dichotomies of old and new media obsolete. Their meaning and implications transcend the communication sphere, to question issues such as the transformation of power and new forms of citizenship. Against a simplistic portrayal of media effect as being totally manipulated by politics or, at the contrary, manipulating the public opinion, the series demonstrate the complex interface between media and politics, in which technical, cultural, and professional hybridity thrives, coloured by confrontation, but also by adaptation, negotiation, and cooperation. Most importantly, the series is an attempt to reflect on the diversity and creativity of the journalistic practice in its context beyond universal models of ‘good’ journalism, to grasp the multiple meanings of this practice, its specific connections to its context, including structural volatility, political uncertainty, questions of safety and job precarity.
This special issue is an attempt to understand the interplay between media and politics beyond normative theories and approaches based on Western models. It is also an opportunity to advance these theories in questioning their possible applications to contexts outside the Western world in which the media and politics operate in closed or hybrid political regimes and where journalistic practices are governed more by uncertainty than stability, as demonstrated by various articles in this issue. However, the clientelist instrumentalization of the media in new democracies and hybrid regimes for the service of shifting loyalties can be considered as the most common feature of the journalistic practice, thus exacerbating the fragility of journalists’ independence, in the absence of a clearly defined notion of professionalism.
Bringing seven articles by leading researchers, this special issue is an attempt to reflect on the diversity of the field of studying the interplay between media and politics in tumultuous political change or street protest, with focus on the multiple facets of the struggle between structures and agency taking place in old and new media, and in different countries in the MENA region. The articles present a variety of methods from qualitative and quantitative approaches. Two case studies from Turkish and Egyptian media industries investigate the political economy on media industries under renewed autocracy, demonstrating how state manipulation of media ownership and advertisement revenues hinder the development of a plural media landscape (Zahraa Badr and Servet Yanatma). Three case studies from Tunisia and Lebanon media and politics depict the dynamics of interdependency between the media and politics based on empirical investigations. They aim to respond to the scarcity of empirically informed research on the interplay between media and politics while avoiding normative assumptions (Katrin Voltmer, Kjetil Selvik, Fatima el Issawi, Francesco Cavatorta and Nidhal Mekki). A case study looks at the use of social media in political propaganda and manipulation of national identities; Cristina Moreno-Almeida’s and Paolo Gerbaudo examine the Moroccan far right use of memes on social media by constructing a scapegoating narrative of the “enemy of the nation” relaying on symbols of the country’s sovereignty. Another case study looks at the important issue of trust in media, thus contributing to fill in the gap of knowledge on the public’s perception and uses; Jed Melki’s and Claudia Kozman examine selective exposure and trust in the news media through a survey on how the Lebanese public used traditional and social media during the October 2019 uprising.
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