Social Media and the Politics of Reportage

The 'Arab Spring'

S. Bebawi,D. Bossio

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137361400
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Social Media and the Politics of Reportage explores the journalistic challenges, issues and opportunities that have risen as a result of social media increasingly being used as a form of crisis reporting within the field of global journalism, with a focus on the protests during the 'Arab Spring'.

Part I

Interactions and Challenges

1

Journalism during the Arab Spring: Interactions and Challenges

Diana Bossio

To say that protests occur ‘on the street’ obscures the complexity of the act. While the importance of those people who brave sanction by participating in public demonstrations on the street cannot be diminished, the protest action does not begin and end there. At its heart, a protest is a communicative action; it communicates the protestors’ will in the most vibrant, dynamic and overt way possible. A protest is meant to be seen, heard and witnessed, but most importantly, the message of the protest is meant to be disseminated to others. Thus, those who bear witness to the protest continue the protestors’ communicative action. In between all of these functions are very complex relationships between various actors, including activists and journalists, to begin and, more importantly, to continue a protest’s communicative action.

The series of ongoing protests referred to now as the ‘Arab Spring’ is probably the most interesting modern example of the protest as a communicative action; the complex series of interactions between activists and witnesses has inspired fervent discussion about the nature of communication in the online, social media age. Apart from the youth-driven resistance played out on the streets, the Arab Spring movement became a focus of media and academic discussion for the texts, images and videos that were transmitted through social media networks and indirectly disseminated by journalists on mainstream news networks. This use of online and social media has been discussed as an example of a shift in the way protest is enacted, promoted and disseminated in the digital age. From bold proclamations of ‘Facebook and Twitter revolutions’ (see O’Donnell, 2011) to derision of the apparent technological determinism attributing social media to success of a protest (see Gladwell, 2011), the one constant in all the political upheaval has been the ongoing discussion of the role of contemporary media in the protests.

This chapter provides an overview of the discourses that have emerged in the media and in academia to represent the interaction between journalists and activists in communicating news and information about the Arab Spring protests. It begins by reviewing the kinds of interactions that occurred between activists and journalists, as well as the positive and negative discourses that emerged about both the role of journalists and the use of social media in the Arab Spring. The chapter will end with an analysis of some of the reasons for the complex interaction between activists and journalists during the Arab Spring. In doing so, I wish to illustrate that the Arab Spring protests demonstrate the complexity of the new media world and the communicative actions that occur within it. The complexity of these interactions often means that the traditional roles ascribed to actors and witnesses in a protest become intertwined and inevitably lead to tensions between actors. By illustrating the ways in which these complexities have occurred, this chapter will provide an overview to subsequent chapters of this book about the Arab Spring and the politics of reporting information in the online, digital and social media–enabled age of communication.

The context for discussion of the Arab Spring protests

Much reportage about the Arab Spring protests has suggested that they began with one street vendor in Tunisia. When Mohammed Bouaziz set fire to himself in a desperate final protest of governmental hypocrisy in Tunisia, images of his action spread on YouTube and were disseminated around the globe. The mass protests sparked in Tunisia after his funeral toppled Zine El Abidine Ben Ali’s government, and in a tumultuous turn of events, the protests then seemingly ‘spread’ to Egypt, Libya, Syria and other nations in the Arab world. The protests were credited with toppling two more seemingly immovable dictatorships, as well as beginning armed conflict in some places and creating continuing instability in the region. While they seemed to occur ‘out of thin air’, each nation involved in the Arab Spring protests has a long and complex political, social, cultural and, of course, media history. It appears that many factors emerged simultaneously in each of these nations, creating a ‘perfect storm’ of events conducive to the mass protests.

Taking Egypt as an example of how a multitude of factors contributed to their Arab Spring, the 2010 and early 2011 protests can be seen to have a long political and historical context. This historical context lies in the economic hardship, crippling youth unemployment and importantly, the repressive 30-year reign of Hosni Mubarak’s political regime (see Dhillon & Yousef, 2009). While Egypt’s economy and political ties with the West (particularly the USA) was considered important in the region, the predominantly young, upwardly mobile demographic of Egypt did not feel the benefits of these links (see ­Cottle, 2011).

It is no surprise in this context that the largely well-educated but economically repressed youth of Egypt became an increasingly loud voice for change. Indeed, Dhillon and Youssef (2009) illustrate that youth political protest against the Mubarak regime grew popular in 2004 through the work of The Egyptian Movement for Change, best known through its slogan Kifaya (English translation: Enough). Kifaya was founded by 300 Egyptian intellectuals with the objective of ousting Mubarak from power. It was one of the first political coalitions to break the taboo against government criticism, often using social media in Egypt to call for change (see Teti & Gervasio, 2012). The April 6 youth movement has also used social media to disseminate their activism. This movement began as a Facebook group in 2008 to support workers in a national strike.

Apart from this political environment, social factors also impacted on the protests in Egypt, including increased access to social media and communications methods between nations. As suggested by Cottle (2011), following Ghannam (2011), increased access to social media in Egypt has increased user participation in online information networks and also exposure to other news services and political systems. While Cottle (2011) criticises the lack of critical reporting of Western engagement with the Middle East in the lead-up to the protests, he nonetheless suggests that the exposure to external media had a role in immersing Egyptian youth with ‘wider cultural flows that normalise democratic practices and civil rights’.

Political and social changes occurring internally in the Arab Spring nations have been the most important aspects of the protests; however, the dramatic speed of change could not have occurred without the striking changes also occurring within the contemporary mediasphere. These changes in the mediasphere, and particularly in news reportage and dissemination, have their own complex historical background. Much has already been written in the academy and in the media about the changes that have occurred to media production, consumption and reception in the digital, online and now social age of media and communications. As Livingstone suggests (1999), the conventional ‘one to many’ model of disseminating news has been usurped somewhat by the user-generated media created with relatively inexpensive and user-friendly digital software. Bowman and Willis (2003: 9) have suggested that the social repercussions of technological change, such as blogging, citizen journalism and alternative media, have meant that it has been the act of citizens, rather than professional journalists, that have allowed for reporting, analysing and disseminating information of a global scale. Much has also been written about the changing work of the journalist in an online age; reportage of news and information has been impacted by a variety of technological, economic and institutional changes. Traditionally, the interaction between professional journalism, user-generated content and the online sphere has been discussed within a framework of the ‘threat’ that online user-generated content might pose to mainstream media (Mitchelstein & Boczkowski, 2009: 567). These ‘threats’ to journalism were posited in the form of increased workloads, diminished newsrooms and industrial impacts that have been documented by academics and the media.

On the other hand, contemporary academic study of user-generated content in the news has documented the mostly positive impacts of these changes within the mediasphere. The rise of the amateur media practitioner, in the guise of the blogger, the citizen journalist or even a contributor of user-generated content, has made a significant impact on the mediasphere. There are many types and definitions of amateur journalism that have become popular, but most have the same qualities in common: ‘Despite its ambiguities, the term ‘citizen journalism’ appeared to capture something of the countervailing ethos of the ordinary person’s capacity to bear witness, thereby providing commentators with a useful label to characterize an ostensibly new genre of reporting’ (Allen, 2005: 18). Contemporary academic study of online alternative journalism has also taken into account grassroots journalistic practice, including citizen journalism and the use of social media to distribute news. These studies have been based on theoretical frameworks encapsulating the ‘democratisation’ of the news process through online citizen journalism or ‘produsers’ (Bruns, 2005).

Contemporary academic research has also focused on the innovative uses of social, digital and online media in journalistic practice (see Heinrich, 2011; Hermida, 2010; Deuze, 2003). These innovations include using new tools, new presentation techniques and new interactions with their audience as ‘credible sources’ (Bruns, 2003; Bowman & Willis, 2003). The possible news functions of social media such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have all been the subject of media and academic scrutiny. Hermida (2010: 297), for example, poses that Twitter is ‘micro-blogging as “awareness systems” that provide journalists with more complex ways of understanding and reporting on the subtleties of public communication’. Other research has examined the way new media tools and media users have affected the norms of journalism and the values of the ‘news’ genre. Lasorsa et al.’s (2012: 19) research on Twitter, for example, found that social media tools altered the presentation of journalists’ reportage:

journalists more freely express opinions, a common micro-­blogging practice but one which contests the journalistic norm of objectivity (impartiality and non-partisanship). To a lesser extent, the journalists also adopted two other norm-related micro-­blogging features: providing accountability and transparency regarding how they conduct their work, and sharing user-generated content with their followers.

Thus the positive implications of amateur or citizen journalism have been discussed as the apparent democratisation and pluralisation of the journalistic process – the more people involved in the investigation, production and dissemination of news, the better opportunity there is for information to be disseminated to global audiences. Allen (2005: 18) suggests that the South Asian tsunamis in 2004 was one of the decisive ‘moments’ in citizen journalism, where hundreds of images, video and other media created by people living the crisis was the most prominent aspect of the news coverage. Similarly, the BBC reported that in the wake of the bomb attacks on the underground train system in 2005, the organisation received 22,000 emails and text messages with information about the bombings. In the first hour alone, they received 50 of the 3000 images they would then go on to use in reportage (Douglas, 2006). Most global news organisations like CNN, BBC and Al Jazeera now have dedicated teams to manage the huge amount of user-generated content they receive each day and during big news events.

Nonetheless, the Arab Spring differs slightly from the above examples as one of the first in-depth, meaningful collaborations between activists, alternative media practitioners and professional journalists to report and disseminate information about a news event. Academic discussion of these apparent collaborations have been informed by contemporary theoretical frameworks suggesting the ways in which productive interactions between professional and non-pro...

Table of contents

• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I  Interactions and Challenges
• Part II  Political Effects
• Part III  Predicting the Future
• Index