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DOI: 10.1177/1464884911410017
2011 12: 647Journalism
Simon Cottle
Media and the Arab uprisings of 2011: Research notes
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Professor Simon Cottle, Cardiff School of Journalism, Media & Cultural Studies, Cardiff University, Bute
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Email: cottles@cardiff.ac.uk
Media and the Arab
uprisings of 2011:
Research notes
Simon Cottle
Cardiff University, UK
Abstract
In the opening months of 2011 the world witnessed a series of tumultuous events in
North Africa and the Middle East that soon became known as the Arab uprisings. What
is striking about them is not only their historical momentousness and stunning speed
of succession across so many countries, but also the different ways in which media
and communications became inextricably infused inside them. Indeed some have been
so bold as to label them as the ‘Twitter Revolutions’ or ‘Facebook Revolutions.’ This,
however, does less than justice to the media complexities involved. This essay sets out
to capture something of the broader, overlapping and interpenetrating ways in which
media systems and communication networks have complexly conditioned and facilitated
these remarkable historical events and communicated them around the world. In this
way it aims to broaden the frame of reference for future in-depth, scholarly research.
Keywords
Arab uprisings, communication networks, mass protests, news ecology, social media
In the opening months of 2011 the world witnessed a series of tumultuous events in
North Africa and the Middle East that soon became known as the Arab uprisings. Mass
protests, first in Tunisia, then in Egypt and a succession of other Arab states, including
Morocco, Algeria, Yemen, Oman, Bahrain and Libya, as well as Syria, Iran and Lebanon
and, more tentatively, Saudi Arabia, all challenged the repressive, anti-democratic
nature of these regimes (International Crisis Group, 2011). They called for an end to
corruption, improved living conditions, democracy and the protection of human rights.
When Mohammed Bouaziz set fire to himself in the Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid in
Journalism
12(5) 647–659
© The Author(s) 2011
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December 2010 – a desperate act of defiance following his denied attempts to work as a
street vendor to support his family – he lit a flame that soon burned in capitals and cities
across much of the Arab world. The scenes of his self-immolation captured by passers
by and posted on YouTube as well as those of the mass protests that followed his funeral,
quickly circulated in Tunisia and beyond.
New social media – YouTube, Twitter, Facebook – along with online bloggers and
mobile telephony, all played an important role in communicating, coordinating and channelling
this rising tide of opposition and variously managed to bypass state controlled
national media as they propelled images and ideas of resistance and mass defiance across
the Middle East and North Africa. The startling and dramatic scenes from Egypt of the
‘Day of Anger’(25 January) followed by the ‘Day of Rage’culminating in the ‘March of
the Millions’ (1 February), that forced President Hosni Mubarak’s departure, also pulsed
through satellite and international news coverage. Foreign correspondents in Tahrir
Square not only helped to focus world attention on these momentous events but also
helped grant them a human face. Mass uprising on the streets of Egypt now appeared less
distanced, less humanly remote. Visceral scenes and emotional testimonies elicited on
the street brought home to watching millions something of the protestors’ everyday
despair and democratic aspirations as well as their extraordinary courage in confronting,
by non-violent means, repressive state violence. And some, we know, lost their lives.
As the world’s news media and new social networks communicated these dramatic
images of mass opposition from across much of the Arab world, so western democracies,
practised in the ways of doing business with authoritarian regimes as well as oppressive
states skilled in the means of coercive power, looked on and will have wondered what
these shocking events meant for them. A seismic shift in the world’s political tectonic
plates was taking place, comparable perhaps to 1989 but, as then, no one could foresee
how far, how deep or at what pace this opening fault-line of democracy would continue
to run. It took a rupture in the earth’s geological tectonic plates off the coast of Japan
(11 March) and the resulting earthquake, tsunami, nuclear meltdown and financial turmoil
(also captured in real-time by a variety of media) to temporarily dislodge the Arab
political earthquake from its centre position on the world news stage.
At the time of writing it is too early to say how these popular uprisings will eventually
play out and whether they will manage to win regime change, social justice and the
democratization of states and civil societies. Zine al-Abedine Ben Ali in Tunisia and
Hosni Mubarak in Egypt have both been ousted and interim authorities have promised
elections and thorough-going reforms, though military and conservative forces remain in
the wings. Ali Abdullah Saleh in Yemen has also promised to step down in forthcoming
elections. Protests meanwhile continue elsewhere in the Arab world and have been met
with brutal violence, promises of reform and, as in Saudi Arabia, cynical bribes seeking
to buy off discontent. The iron fist in the velvet glove is barely disguised. Saudi Arabia
and the United Arab Emirates sent military forces to help squash the peaceful protests in
Bahrain, and video scenes of appalling state violence in Syria and elsewhere, as well as
reports of abduction and torture across many Arab states, circulate widely.
In Libya, popular mass mobilization had initially liberated much of the country from
Muammar Gaddafi’s 42-year grip on power, but from his stronghold in and around
Tripoli he unleashed mercenaries and military forces against his own people, winning
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back rebel towns and plunging the country into bloody conflict (the rebels dispute the
designation ‘civil war’). At first the world watched as governments procrastinated and
debated the possibilities of military and humanitarian intervention, before finally the UN
Security Council agreed to a no-fly zone and authorized member states to ‘take all necessary
measures’ to ‘protect civilians and civilian populated areas under attack.’ (UN
Resolution 1973, 18 March).
What is striking about this wave of uprisings is not only their historical momentousness
and stunning speed of succession across so many countries, but also the different
ways in which media and communications have become inextricably infused inside
them. Indeed some have been so bold as to label them as the ‘Twitter Revolutions’ or
‘Facebook Revolutions’ in recognition of the prominent part played by new social
media, whether in the co-ordination of mass protests, communication of real-time
images and up-to-date information, or processes of contagion across the Arab region.
This however is to do less than justice to both the political and media complexities
involved or their mutual interaction moving through time. The following sets out, therefore,
to capture something of the broader ways in which media and communications
have variously entered into these events. While certainly granting new social media
their due, the discussion seeks to invite a more holistic appreciation of the overlapping
and interpenetrating ways in which media systems and communication networks have
complexly conditioned and facilitated these remarkable historical events and communicated
them around the world. In this way it aims to broaden the frame of reference for
future in-depth, scholarly research.
A preliminary inventory identifying 10 different forms of media and communication
inscription within these events is outlined later. These point to the complex ways in
which today’s media systems and communication networks have become infused within
the uprisings and as they have politically unfolded over time. Mass protests and political
uprisings do not simply erupt from nowhere of course, even if the ‘event orientation’
of news and authorities ‘in denial’ may suggest otherwise. No matter how spontaneous
or seemingly unplanned, they arise from somewhere and are informed by preceding
grievances and ambitions for change. Flash mobs have a political home. And major
protests and demonstrations can continue to live on in the collective memories and
political (re)actions of the reconfigured political field left behind – sometimes long
after the news cameras and foreign correspondents have moved on. (A symbolic down
payment of sorts, deposited in the future political account.) How today’s media ecology
has become infused within the Arab uprisings stretches, therefore, across the period of
growing discontent and opposition that precipitated the uprisings, the period of the
revolts themselves, and the ensuing processes of revolutionary consolidation, state
reforms and/or ongoing repression and resistance that now characterize the situation in
different Arab countries.
Across these moments of political struggle and change, media and communications
have played an inextricable part in extending their scope and sending visible shock
waves like a political tsunami through the Middle East and North Africa and beyond to
different national, regional and global shores. Ten different ways, then, in which media
systems and communications networks have become inscribed inside the Arab uprisings
and entered into their unfolding political trajectory.
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1.  State controlled Arab media, blind western media
Though it is tempting to focus on the role of media and perhaps new social media
specifically in the immediate events of the Arab uprisings, a more politically contextualized
approach would need to inquire first into how state-run Arab media have
performed over preceding years and how they served to legitimize their political
regimes (see Hafez, 2007; Miladi, 2011; Sakr, 2007); also how outside mainstream
news media have played a less than critical role when reporting on many of them. This
includes the western media’s conspicuous silence toward the everyday suppression of
political dissent, human rights abuses and earlier emergent protests whilst uncritically
reporting on their own government’s trade and arms initiatives and conciliatory diplomatic
relations bolstering such regimes in power. If western media had performed a
more independent and critically engaged role, is it conceivable that the Arab uprisings
of 2011, though surprising in terms of their speed and scale, could nonetheless have
been better understood and contextualized within a preceding narrative of growing
political disenchantment and despair?
2.  Media, consumerism and democracy
Though western news media have played less than a democratizing role in the political
run-up to the uprisings of 2011, the globalizing culture of consumerism and normative
outlooks of western democracies arguably forms an unspoken backdrop in western entertainment
conglomerates and their satellite news channels. This has contributed to the
globalization of the values and tenets of economic individualism and liberal democracy.
Media penetrated societies can no longer remain hermetically sealed from this global
culture of valorized consumption, or the ‘soft power’ of communication flows that now
transverse the globe providing symbolic referents for democracy and its emulation
(Giddens, 2002; Nye, 1990).
Noticeably, the general democratic impulse expressed within the Arab uprisings surprised
many in the West, confounding expectations post 9/11, post Afghanistan and Iraq,
that Islam and anti-western sentiments would play a more prominent steering role in
processes of regime change. The youthful composition of Arab populations and their
broad-based demographics more generally have no doubt played an important part in
defining the political ambitions and seemingly secular aims of the uprisings as well as
their human rights focus. Kristian Ulrichsen and his colleagues, amongst others, for
example, observes how: ‘65% of the population of the Middle East is under the age of 30
and are increasingly technology-savvy and adept at using new forms of communication
to bypass state controls and mobilize around common issues or grievances’and ‘Bloggers
in Egypt and Tunisia were instrumental in publicizing and spreading accounts of torture
and human rights violations by the security services’ (Ulrichsen et al. 2011). Young people,
plugged into western media and immersed in wider cultural flows that normalize
democratic practices and civil rights as well as conspicuous consumption, have become
an established communications backdrop in much of the Arab world notwithstanding the
tensions and contradictions this poses to ‘embattled’ religious authorities and patriarchal
structures of domination.
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3.  Media conviviality in everyday life
Media and communications in the Arab world not only convey images and ideas that are
circulated and consumed more widely in today’s globalizing communication flows, they
also enter into the everyday via new social media, becoming part of the mundane sociability
and conviviality of modernity. Though not necessarily enacting elevated forums
for ‘high’political debates about ‘Democracy’, the popular uptake of social media within
everyday life proves ‘democratizing’ nonetheless. New social media help to bring into
being a new space for social inclusivity, group recognition and pluralized participation as
well as different forms of political conversation and engagement (Dahlgren, 2009). This
everyday conversation and conviviality entered into via new social media helps to instantiate
moments of social connectedness and interaction in which identities and interests,
rights and responsibilities can become recognized and performed and may even produce
new templates for the conduct of civil society beyond the virtual world.
According to a recent research report, Social Media in the Arab World (Ghannam,
2011), documenting the uptake and use of new social media across different Arab countries
and published in the immediate aftermath of the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings,
‘the Arab world has witnessed the rise of an independent vibrant social media and steadily
increasing citizen engagement on the Internet that is expected to attract 100 million
Arab users by 2015’. It concludes, ‘These social networks inform, mobilize, entertain,
create communities, increase transparency, and seek to hold governments accountable’
(Ghannam, 2011: 4). The new tools of sociability and conviviality can thus prove to be
‘democratizing’ in both the sense of facilitating pluralized interaction and intercourse in
everyday life as well as providing the means for organizing for system change and the
political establishment of ‘Democracy’(Ghanavizi, 2011; Sreberny and Khiabany, 2010).
4.  Facilitating/communicating protest
New social media, including YouTube, Facebook, Flickr and Twitter, mobile telephony
distributing SMS (short message service) messages, images and live video streams, and
internet bloggers have all played a key role in the recent uprisings though in differing
permutations across the different countries concerned. Inflated claims about the power of
new social media to foment protest and revolution lend themselves to the charge of
media centrism and technological determinism, theoretical optics that obfuscate the preceding
social and political forces at work as well as the purposive actions of human
beings prepared to confront state intimidation and violence in pursuit of political change.
But, equally, claims that simply deny the important role of new media in coalescing
broad-based, non-hierarchical political movements and coordinating and channelling
their demographic weight into real democratic power, fail to understand the changed
nature of today’s media and communications environment or how this can now be harnessed
by activists and protestors and creatively infused inside political struggle (Cottle
and Lester, 2011). The argument, therefore, is not so much about whether new social
media did, or did not perform a determining role in the events in question but rather how
exactly media systems and new communication networks complexly interacted, entered
into and shaped them.
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A Tunisian blogger, Sami Ben Ghabia, maintains, for example, that much of the
content about the revolution in the mainstream media originated from Tunisians using
Facebook, but this was then collected, translated and reposted on the website Nawaat,
an independent blog set up for dissenting Tunisian voices and produced in exile, and
then passed on via Twitter for mainstream journalists (cited in Ghannam, 2011: 16).
Each uprising, easily accessed by their different hashtags (Tunisia #SidiBouzid, Egypt
#Jan25, Bahrain #Feb14, Libya #Feb17, Saudi Arabia #Mar20), constantly updated
information and links to crowd-sourcing maps. These offered journalists and others an
accessible if not always strictly verifiable overview of what was occurring on the
ground. ‘If content had remained strictly on Facebook’, it has been argued, ‘its audience
would have been limited to those who are members of certain groups, and would not
likely have been disseminated in ways that proved pivotal to the media coverage’
(Ghannam, 2011: 16).
In other words, new social media and mainstream media often appear to have performed
in tandem, with social media variously acting as a watchdog of state controlled
national media, alerting international news media to growing opposition and dissent
events and providing raw images of these for wider dissemination. International news
media, in turn, including Al Jazeera, have distributed the flood of disturbing scenes and
reports of the uprisings now easily accessed via Google’s YouTube and boomeranged
them back into the countries concerned. Mainstream newspapers and news broadcasters
in their online variants also increasingly incorporate direct links to these new social
media, effectively acting as a portal to their updating communication flows and near
live-streaming of images direct from the protests themselves. This moving complex of
interpenetrating communication flows and their political efficacy across the different
uprisings deserves careful documentation and comparative analysis in the months and
years ahead.
Generalizations about the role of news social media in the uprisings, for the present at
least, must be desisted: ‘the importance and impact of social media on each of the rebellions
we have seen this year’, concludes one media observer, ‘has been defined by specific
local factors (not least how people live their lives online in individual countries and
what state limits were in place). Its role has been shaped too by how well organized the
groups using social media have been’ (Beaumont, 2011: 2). Even more fundamental in
this respect is the varying penetration of these new technologies into daily life within and
across different Arab societies (Ghannam, 2011).
5.  Facilitating repressive state responses
It is not only activists that have become increasingly media-savvy in recent years,
deploying new social media to organize and coordinate protests and distribute tactical
information and so on, but also repressive regimes. The Arab uprisings produced numerous
instances of regimes trying to censor and contain the flow of images and information
by ‘pulling the plug’on the internet, monitoring telecommunications and disrupting
the work of foreign journalists through personal intimidation, targeting particular foreign
news bureaus or simply refusing journalists visas and access to the country.
Mubarak’s government, as well as Colonel Gaddafi in Libya, have also sought to rally
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pro-government supporters in particular locations at particular times by ordering mobile
service providers to send text messages; a tactic that has also been used to dupe protesters
into arriving at particular locations, dispersing them and/or positioning them to be
picked up by the security forces.
As Evgeny Morozov (2011) elaborates in The Net Delusion, the internet is not solely
the preserve of the democratically inclined. Repressive regimes around the world now
deploy sophisticated digital censorship and monitoring capabilities and engage in cyber
attacks and the targeting of media activists and dissidents – and have done so for some
time. And needless to say, state controlled media, whether press, television or radio, will
be put to full propaganda purposes when repressive regimes are challenged. A laughable
example of this, perhaps, was Muammar Gaddafi’s opportunistic claims on Libyan state
television that scenes of the TUC’s mass demonstration in London against the coalition
government’s cuts (26 March 2011), was in fact depicting protests against the western
invasion of Libya.
Rather than seeing the authoritarian use of the internet as a knockout blow in the argument
against so-called ‘cyber-utopians’ and their medium-centric enthusiasm for the
net’s democratizing possibilities, this is better conceived as an inevitable part of all political
struggles when conducted in, through and on the media and communications battlefield.
Historically this is neither new nor surprising and remains contingent upon the
weighting of political forces and their respective capacities to exert control and creatively
innovate in the communications field.
Repressive states do not hold all the technological trump cards in their hands and,
increasingly, media-savvy activists swap and share theirs to help protesters circumvent
attempted controls and gain the communications initiative. When states have sought to
deny internet access to particular websites by blocking servers, activists have made use
of ‘proxy’ international servers and ‘ghost servers’ disguising the networks involved.
When Mubarak turned off the internet and SMS services (28 January 2011) for nearly a
week, an Al Jazeera producer observed how within days ‘clandestine FTP (File Transfer
Protocol) accounts were set up to move videos out to international news outlets’, and
‘While accredited members of the media struggled to communicate and coordinate, street
protestors were using landlines to call supporters, who translated and published their
accounts on Twitter for an international audience hungry for news . . .’ (Ishani, 2011).
Views of the internet and new social media as either democratically benign or essentially
open to repressive state appropriation and control, then, generally fail to interrogate
the dynamic play of power and constantly updating war of technological manoeuvre that
informs the battle for communication power.
6.  Media contagion
There is an understandable reticence by many media scholars to entertain causal ideas of
media contagion and even more so when invoked in the context of political uprisings.
Behaviourist claims about the media contagion of urban riots in 1960s’ America (see
Kerner, 1968) and 1980s’ Britain (Scarman, 1986), for example, as well as the term’s
pathological connotation, tend to render the political motivations involved literally
meaningless and thereby encourage conservative interpretations of collective violence
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(Cottle, 1993: 18–31). Though this may be so, the breathtaking wave of uprisings and
their rapid spread from one Arab country to another point nonetheless to the evident
ways in which contemporary communication of dissent can help to embolden others,
provide templates for action and thereby help to release pent-up political forces of
change. The way images of political dissent and protest spill over national borders or
leapfrog across entire countries or even regions, to impact upon political struggles waged
elsewhere around the world, points once again to the transnationalizing nature of global
protest communications as well as their capacity to help build and sustain feelings of
political affinity and solidarity (Allan and Thorsen, 2009, Cottle and Lester, 2011).
It is not only the demonstration of people power, however, that is ‘contagious’ and
communicated via media and communication networks lending hope and inspiration to
those embarked on similar struggles elsewhere, or via the replication of symbolic forms
of protest such as the occupation of city central squares/plazas or extreme acts of selfimmolation
by ‘martyrs’ to the cause – like Mohammed Bouaziz. Also ‘contagious’ are
the constantly evolving communication tactics and creative adaptations of the same
communicated around the world by media activists seeking to evade and counter media
censorship and imposed media controls. In the years and months before the uprisings,
media activists in Egypt and elsewhere, for example, were actively studying the tactics
of networked opposition conducted elsewhere, including Iran’s Green Movement and
the communications tactics developed in the mass protests challenging the June 2009
election (Ishani, 2011).
7.  International recognition and protest legitimation
Media and communications also enter the frame of political uprisings and mass protests
in terms of how they become defined and deliberated in the international arena, especially
as mass demonstrations destabilize the regimes in question. Whereas western governments
at first seemed to be wrong-footed by the surprise and speed of the Arab revolts
and equivocated about their possible causes, demographic composition and legitimacy
(especially in respect of their foremost Middle-East ally, Egypt), the news media in the
UK in contrast, and possibly more widely, appeared to grant early recognition to the
protesters’ aims, sense of grievance and cause. In other words western news media
helped to grant them legitimacy and in advance of elite political statements. Only as the
political efficacy of the protests was grasped and the demise of the regimes such as
Mubarak’s in Egypt anticipated, did official pronouncements begin to move toward a
more supportive position toward the demonstrators, their civil rights and legitimate
claims for democracy.
Contrary to established models of elite indexing (Bennett, 1990; Bennett et al., 2007;
Hallin, 1994), this finding seemingly suggests that mainstream media can, on some occasions,
adopt a more independent and critically informed news stance even when political
elites exhibit a relatively united front in terms of their expressed views on the political
contention in question. At least part of the explanation for this more independent and
sympathetic media representation can be found in today’s global news ecology (Cottle,
2009). This now includes the cross-fertilization of different communication flows from
around the world and the influence particularly of 24/7 satellite channels such as CNN,
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BBC World and Al-Jazeera (the latter increased its market share exponentially during
these events).
It is also located in those up-close and personal scenes and testimonies collected by
correspondents physically ‘embedded’ in the crowds, witnessing their situation and possibly
feeling their collective hopes and vulnerability in the face of an increasingly desperate
political regime. The phenomenological dimension of embedding, so acutely
observed and consequential in the context of war reporting (Morrison and Tumber, 1988;
Tumber, 2004), may also be at work in other contexts of journalist immersion especially
when witnessing human vulnerability and traumatic events, whether humanitarian crises
and disasters (Cottle and Nolan, 2007) or popular uprisings confronting state violence.
Stories and sentiments are now also vividly captured via new social media and media
monitoring services such as BBC Monitoring, that survey round-the-clock, TV, radio,
press, internet and news agency sources worldwide, and these are also available to journalists
and editors back in the newsroom.
Activists and protesters on the ground can also be acutely aware of the need for international
media recognition and are often seen clamouring for opportunities in front of
mainstream news cameras to put their case across to international audiences and governments.
Indeed the performative and dramaturgical nature of protests is in many respects
premised upon this underlying political need to win wider recognition, legitimacy and
support (Alexander, 2006; McAdam, 2000). How exactly this dramaturgy for democracy
became conducted in and through today’s overlapping media flows and communication
networks remains fertile ground for further research.
8.  Media and the global village of repressive states
Just as repressive regimes confronting political opposition and dissent inside their borders
will tighten their grip on media and redouble their efforts to censor, monitor, dupe
and target their opponents, so repressive regimes elsewhere in the world are also predisposed
to do likewise when witnessing the potentially toxic infusion of mediated images
and ideas of resistance from afar. They will also seek to learn lessons from the communication
struggles waged elsewhere and seek to implement or adapt them when required.
Both China and Iran, for example, sought to control the tide of images and information
of the Arab uprisings coursing through the global news networks and internet. The
Chinese authorities clamped down hard after calls for a ‘Jasmine Revolution’ modelled
on the pro-democracy protests surging through the Middle East, quickly detaining suspected
activists and censoring online calls to stage protests in Beijing, Shanghai and
other major cities. The reverberations that flow from the Arab uprisings further underline
the global intensification of communications within today’s political geography as their
impacts move outwards as powerful ripple effects to repressive regimes and democracies
with vested interests around the world.
9.  Human rights surveillance and the responsibility to protect
As protestors came up against state repression and military violence, so images
and accounts of human rights abuses began to course through available media and
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confounding the efforts of authorities to censor and impose a communications blackout.
When Libya banned journalists from entering Libyan territory in the initial days of the
uprising and military crackdown, images soon circulated on YouTube that were incorporated
into mainstream news media and documenting attacks on rebel forces by Libyan
heavy armour. Dubbed ‘The Global YouTube News Bureau’, vivid images bearing witness
to human rights abuses and impending humanitarian catastrophe circulated despite
the absence of foreign correspondents on the ground. As they did so, calls were increasingly
heard for those responsible to be pursued and prosecuted in the International
Criminal Court.
In the context of the Libyan dictator’s refusal to concede power and his preparedness
to use military force, including heavy weaponry and military aircraft against his own
people, the world’s media increasingly gave vent to the calls for humanitarian and/or
military intervention. A period of governmental procrastination ensued before the United
Nations Security Council eventually agreed a no-fly zone and the necessary military
measures to protect civilians. Though a far cry from a simplistic ‘CNN model’ of media
causality, how these scenes and calls became communicated in the news media and registered
on the international political stage warrants serious attention. This is all the more
so in the context of the United Nations’ proclaimed acceptance of the ‘Responsibility to
Protect’ (R2P) doctrine and the establishment of political precedents that may yet have
consequences for future humanitarian interventions (Evans, 2008).
Precedents established in Libya, as elsewhere, therefore, can influence future events,
international policy responses and even the self-interested calculations of autocratic dictators
when contemplating violence and genocidal actions against their own populations
in the future. Though western media have given some time and space to the issues of
humanitarian response and a possible no-fly zone, rarely has this sought to contextualize
this debate in respect of the evolving world acceptance of the ‘Responsibility to Protect’
(R2P) doctrine, formally recognized since the UN World Summit in 2005, and how it
requires a reconceptualization of ideas of national sovereignty. In the days and weeks
following the UN Security Council’s mandate for member states to ‘protect civilians and
civilian populated areas under attack’ the voices advocating forced regime change and
military support for the rebels have become more pronounced. In this context the news
media narrative, at least in Britain, appears to have succumbed increasingly to the classic
forms of ‘war journalism’, not ‘peace journalism’ (Lynch and McGoldrick, 2005),
forgetting the original humanitarian-safeguarding mission authorized within the UN’s
1973 resolution.
They key point here, however, is that the media can sometimes perform a necessary
and possibly influential role in alerting world opinion to repressive and potentially prosecutable
acts of inhumanity such as those following in the wake of mass uprisings and
can serve moreover as a public forum for deliberating the moral dilemmas and practical
difficulties involved in humanitarian militarized intervention. Ideally these same media
could yet perform a more educative role in informing publics around the world about the
existing Responsibility to Protect framework and how this obliges the world’s governments
to intervene to protect human lives when sovereign states manifestly fail to do so,
or worse when they deliberately target their own citizens.
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10.  New media systems maintaining democratic momentum
And finally, the role of media and communications in maintaining the democratizing
momentum of political movements for change in the post-uprising phase will inevitably
continue to have deep significance for the reconstruction of civil society and the pace
of democratic advance. In countries such as Tunisia and Egypt this will require revised
systems of media regulation and institutional governance as well as shifts in professional
practices and cultural outlooks on the part of those media workers and organizations
closely associated with the former regimes. And so too will new media
organizations and media forms be required to better express established and emergent
constituencies of political, social and religious interests now beginning to compete to
steer processes of reform and civil society reconstruction. Though we need to be wary
of rushing to make comparisons with media performance and difficulties observed in
post-communist societies and societies in transition (e.g. Downing, 1996; McNair,
1994), these research findings may yet hold lessons about likely difficulties and obstacles
to journalism’s role(s) in the democratization of civil societies including processes
of ‘elite-continuity’ (Sparks, 2008).
In Libya it was interesting to observe how almost immediately following the liberation
of Benghazi, the stronghold town of opposition to Gaddafi’s regime, a new daily
newspaper simply called ‘Libya’quickly sprang up, carrying on its masthead a picture of
the national flag before Gaddafi took power and carrying the words ‘We do not surrender –
we win or die’ – the rallying call of a Libyan resistance leader during the Italian occupation.
‘Radio Free Libya from the Green Mountain’, a new radio station, also appeared
and the BBC Monitoring Service reports on a new three-page newsletter, Intifada.
Published on a daily basis and produced by citizen journalists, this has been distributed on
the streets and uploaded to the internet since the beginning of the Libyan uprising.
New forms of political communication often come into being and can flourish when
there is a felt need for them. Inevitably these will make use of whatever communication
technologies are available at the time (Sreberny and Mohammadi, 1994). They can perform
a vital role in maintaining, expressing and steering political momentum and constituting
a public sphere (or spheres) for its wider deliberation. Media and communications
necessarily will form no less an essential part in the continuing political struggles for
regime change and the democratization of state and civil society across the Middle East
and North Africa just as they have in the uprisings themselves.
Toward future research
In time, a more considered, in-depth and comparative analysis of the Arab uprisings
will necessarily have to attend to how media systems and communication networks
have complexly entered into their different and continuing trajectories. This media performance
will also need to be situated in relation to the preceding structures of state
power, the role(s) of the military and also the organization of political opposition in and
across the different societies concerned. Scholars and researchers, some hopefully close
to the events themselves, will also seek to address how media and communications,
both old and new, have entered temporally into the political struggles unfolding within
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these different states and also examine how they spatially extended their reach and
repercussions across different political jurisdictions and with what impacts. What seems
clear, even from the very preliminary discussion in this article, is that today’s media
ecology and communication networks have played an integral and multifaceted part in
building and mobilizing support, coordinating and defining the protests within different
Arab societies and transnationalizing them across the Middle East, North Africa and to
the wider world.
In each of the 10 different ways indicated, media and communications have variously
enabled and enacted, performed and propelled, represented and resisted the Arab
uprisings of 2011 – and are likely to continue to do so and in no less complex and consequential
ways in the years ahead. Together they point to how overlapping, interpenetrating
media systems and communication networks entered into these revolutionary
political struggles and transnationalized them as they unfolded over time, across space
and reverberated politically around the globe. This now demands scholarly attention
and in-depth analysis.
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Biographical note
Simon Cottle is Professor of Media and Communications and Deputy Head of the School of
Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies (JOMEC), Cardiff University. His latest books are Global
Crisis Reporting: Journalism in the Global Age (Open University Press, 2009) and, with co-editor
Libby Lester, Transnational Protests and the Media (Peter Lang, 2011). He is the series editor of
the Global Crises and the Media series for the publisher Peter Lang and, with Mervi Pantti and
Karin Wahl-Jorgensen, he is currently writing Disasters and the Media, to be published later this
year.
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