Journal of Arab & Muslim Media Research - Volume 4, Issue 2-3, 2012

This research explores news production in Egypt during the last half of 2008, relatively late in Hosni Mubarak’s presidency. The study focuses on Al-Ahram, Al-Masry Al-Yom, and Al-Wafd, three major Egyptian dailies representing the range of Egyptian media ownership categories: government-owned, independent (or non-affiliated) and opposition party-owned. The research included extended ethnography-inspired field observation and interviewing. Against the conceptual backdrops of the sociology of news and press systems scholarship, the project presents a model of the Egyptian newspaper system during one important period in the Mubarak era. Results suggest that Egyptian journalists at all three newspapers faced numerous obstacles to information gathering and were forbidden from crossing certain legal and cultural lines in their reporting. The president, security apparatuses and dominant Egyptian cultural beliefs were generally off limits to news organizations, and news content was filtered through mechanisms of control ensuring that content conformed to standards of political, legal and cultural acceptability.

The Egyptian uprising of 2011 was characterized by the instrumental use of social media, especially Facebook, as well as Twitter, YouTube and text messaging by protesters. Facebook, in particular, was hailed as a key mobilizing tool for the protest movement, spurring the mass demonstrations of young protesters converging on Cairo’s Tahrir Square during the uprising. Of the Facebook pages that gained popularity in the Egyptian online community, one page in particular, ‘We Are All Khaled Said’, was credited with mobilizing and organizing the largest number of protesters. An English-language sister page with the same name was launched approximately at the same time, but was geared more towards spreading awareness in the international community of human rights violations and ongoing events in Egypt, rather than organizing protests on the ground. This article will discuss the multiple roles and changing functions of this particular Facebook page during different phases: namely before, during and after the Egyptian revolution, as well as its potentials and limitations in acting as an effective tool for public mobilization, civic engagement and political change.

This study focuses on the major sociocultural attributes of communication via Facebook in two different geographical settings. It identifies cross-cultural differences among two different student cohorts in the UAE and the UK.Sociocultural specificities were addressed by means of quantitative surveying complemented by qualitative interviewing. The social information processing (SIP) theory and Geerte Hofstede theory of ‘cultural dimensions’ represented the epistemological framework for the study.The findings indicate that although the users shared similar responses in terms of their preferences and uses, the study shows that they differ in certain key points related to online behaviour and communication modes (e.g. preferences for contacting friends), conceptualization of Facebook (an extension to university life or a portal to the world) and issues of privacy (expressing oneself openly). These deviations reflect essentially a cultural dissimilarity, which is a core point of the study.

The aim of this article is to discuss the propagation of opinions expressed on the Internet (digital media matrix) in view of a historical development of public opinion. In order to address that, the article examines the debate concerning public opinion based on the works of Walter Lippmann (1961), Niklas Luhmann (1997; 2000; 2005), Jürgen Habermas (1991; 1997) and Dirk Baecker (2004), whereas the concept of a digital media matrix is discussed together with the theories of Niels Finnemann (2001), David White (1964) and Kurt Lewin (1947). The relationship between media and public opinion is defined by the historical emergence of forms of coding between communication agents, previously comprising of senders and receivers (peer-to-peer communication), broadcasting (mass communication) and networks of nodes (digital communication). The propagation of public opinion is depicted as a form shaped by a network of nodes, therefore suggesting a diagram for the distribution of messages and opinions in digital networks described as ‘netclustering’. The article offers a synthesis of the literature on public opinion to suggest a model for the viral propagation of messages within networks such as Twitter and Facebook.

Given consistent findings concerning the media’s effect on shaping attitudes related to minority groups, it is important to understand the impact of the common anti Muslim portrayals currently appearing in many facets of US media. The current study implements an experimental design with five conditions (negative hard news, positive hard news, negative entertainment, negative comedy news and the control) and two dependent variables (support for identity-based policy issues and approval of civil liberty restrictions), and 175 student participants. We investigate the varying impact these different media formats and frames have on attitudes towards Muslims, attitudes related to identity-based policies and on civil liberties protection. The findings indicate that both positive and negative news and comedy news presentations have greater impact than the pure entertainment and control group conditions, and that subjects viewing negative news presentations are much more likely to approve restriction on civil liberties than in the other conditions.

This article uses content analysis to investigate how Al Jazeera English (AJE) and the BBC framed the Egyptian revolution that took place in Cairo at the beginning of 2011. It analyzes a sample of 250 articles to understand how AJE and the BBC implemented five frames: attribution of responsibility; conflict; human interest; economic; and morality. As a result, AJE and the BBC had the similar tendency to focus on the first two frames, although the BBC was also somewhat likely to use the human interest frame. AJE reported more on different groups reproaching one another, and the BBC referred more to winners and losers. Most news articles were predominantly episodic, portraying the government as mainly responsible. In conclusion, AJE and the BBC tended to provide slightly different versions of reality.

Although Islam promises to play an increasing role in the public life of Muslim societies, scholarly analysis often falls short in comprehending the complex and diverse nature of this revival. As Middle Eastern societies open to wider public participation, the emergence of an active Muslim polity seems irrepressible. Yet onlookers from afar worry that Islam will only find political expression through narrow and intolerant ideologies that subvert democratic principles. This article seeks to understand the complex evolution of Islamism, and explain how its restricted and often superficial expression through media may reflect a stunted beginning rather than a permanent state of regressive fundamentalism. Through a case study of Huda TV in the era immediately preceding the rise of social media, this article shows how the powerfully repressive context of Middle Eastern media ensured the enduring stagnation of a nascent political discourse.

In authoritarian-ruled Arab societies, new media, exemplified by the Internet, are perceived as the harbinger of democracy. In interviews conducted in Egypt in 2009, I asked bloggers, human rights activists and journalists about their motivations for blogging, the nature of the relationship between blogging and traditional media practitioners and the challenges that hinder the efficacy of blogging as a social and political force. It seems clear that Egyptian blogs have been used to criticize the political order and mobilize public opinion against the regime. Moreover, the Internet and blogs are helping to transform traditional journalism, making it less susceptible to conservativism and state manipulation, enhancing political activism and expanding the reach of the public sphere.

The role that social media could play in engaging people in the democratic process has recently gained more attention following the series of mass protests and revolutions that has swept the Arab region starting with Tunisia, then emulated in Egypt, and now taking place in Libya. It has been argued that those revolutions were linked, at least in the preliminary stages, to the active use of social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. This article attempts to shed light on these assertions by reporting some early observations from a study which was conducted immediately prior to the revolution in Egypt. In particular it explores the young activists’ perceptions of the potential of social media for mobilizing activism in authoritarian regimes. It thus helps situating social media (SM) in the spectrum of political engagement by gauging young activists’ motivations for utilizing those outlets for political participation aimed at social and political change. This article relies on a survey of a snowball sample of young Egyptian activists, along with focus group discussions (FGD) also, to seek answers to questions about contextual factors such as media scepticism, political efficacy and fear of authority, which are expected to relate to social media motivations and users’ tendencies to engage in forms of online and offline political participation. The findings indicate that young activists were mainly driven by guidance and surveillance needs in their political utilization of social networking sites. A strong positive correlation between online and offline political participation was also detected.