Arab Media & Society

The Arab world's news duopoly is set for a shake-up, and the main contenders are two ventures that are connected to one of the world's biggest media organizations, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. Beirut-based journalist Paul Cochrane looks at the latest developments.

David Faris looks at the role bloggers played in the campaign to enable Egypt's tiny Baha'i minority to obtain identity cards without identifying themselves as Muslims or Christians. He traces the links between a handful of Baha'i bloggers, a wider circle of sympathetic activist bloggers and some key people in the mainstream media. He concludes that the sustained online attention which the plight of Baha’is appears to have won in the end made it difficult for the Egyptian government to countenance the continued violation of Baha’i rights.

Stephen Marmura tries to explain the persistence of mistaken beliefs about 9/11 and about the rationale for invading Iraq among the US and Egyptian publics, concluding that memories and long-term discourses sometimes outweigh short-term media effects.

 Diana Turecek looks at the varied conclusions about the role of the United States that Arab media and commentators have drawn from the global financial crisis.

Lisa Reinisch investigates the coverage of environmental issues by English-language newspapers in the United Arab Emirates and analyses what it says about the evolution of media-government relationships in the country.

Chiara Bernardi's preliminary work on Saudi bloggers and international NGOs finds that they sometimes seem to have different priorities when it comes to women's issues

Evelyn Thai discusses whether Al Jazeera meets the criteria to qualify as 'alternative media' and finds that the Qatar-based channels are arguably unique. “But as transnational news networks proliferate, a theory that accounts for the alterity of transnational media would contribute greatly to an understanding of how mass media continues to evolve.”