Journalism in struggles for democracy: media and polarization in the Middle East

The project examined the political role of journalism in Tunisia and Lebanon, the Arab world's leaders in press freedom. It focused on how journalists deal with political instrumentalization and react in critical situations where key democratic assets are at stake. Media instrumentalization is a widespread phenomenon and its consequences are felt across the world. However, nuanced accounts of how journalists respond to it are in short supply. We addressed this research gap through close empirical investigation of two instructive cases. The study relied on a combination of qualitative interviews, media content analysis and harvesting of Twitter feeds. We conducted 42 face-to-face interviews with journalists in Lebanon and 38 in Tunisia, supplemented by interviews with focus groups and civil society actors. The content analysis documented how journalists portrayed and commented on the tension between national security and civil rights, electoral disputes and popular protests. As for the Twitter data, we zoomed in on the 2019-2020 protests in Lebanon and leading journalists' interpretations of events. Our main finding is that media instrumentalization leads to tensions within the journalistic profession and between journalists and political elites. While it reduces the autonomy of journalism - and thereby its strength as a critical corrective to the powerful - it also triggers independent-minded journalists to resist. These actors increase their room for maneuver by turning competition between politicians to their advantage and connecting with conflicts between ordinary citizens and the elites. The last strategy means that journalism has a disruptive potential despite widespread instrumentalization. In short, we present a more dynamic view of the political implications of media instrumentalization than is common in the literature. The project also makes two further contributions to theory. The first is to analyze the room for journalistic agency in media systems where political parallelism and pervasive media instrumentalization combine, as is the case in many countries outside the West. The media studies literature has analyzed the impact of political parallelism and instrumentalization separately, without reflecting on the tensions that emerge when they operate together. We find that this situation allows journalist to navigate on two different axes of conflict. The first is the horizontal axis of elite-elite competition. The second is the vertical axis of elite-grassroots conflict, since the elites are typically nepotistic and corrupt and distrusted by the mass of ordinary people. Journalists play on one or both of these conflict axes to preserve their professional leeway. The second theoretical contribution concerns the role of media and journalism under hybrid politics that combines both democratic and authoritarian practices. Bringing together recent literatures from comparative politics on hybrid regimes and communication studies on hybrid media, we analyze journalism's active role in the 'politics of uncertainty' (Schedler 2013). To unpack the mechanisms of uncertainty, we distinguish three dimensions of media hybridity: economic, cultural and technological. Using empirical material from Lebanon and Tunisia, we show how ownership structures (economic dimension), journalistic norms and role perceptions (cultural dimension) and digital communication platforms (technological dimension) open up opportunities for journalistic agency in the face of the political elites' attempts to control the public agenda.

Prosjektet har først og fremst bidratt til akademisk utvikling med styrking av fagkompetanse på arabiske medier og demokrati og landkompetanse på Libanon og Tunisia i Norge. Det har også ført til erfaringsutveksling blant forskere og journalister, og vi har formidlet kunnskap til en norsk offentlighet. Akademisk har vi bidratt til å flytte forskningsfronten på forholdet mellom journalistikk og politikk i land som ikke er stabile demokratier. Vi har innledet samarbeid med internasjonale forskningsmiljøer og slik styrket Norges posisjon i akademiske nettverk knyttet til journalistikk og politisk kommunikasjon. Prosjektet organiserte to fokusgrupper i Tunisia der vi presenterte forskningsfunn og inviterte NRK-journalisten Hege Moe Eriksen til å diskutere journalistikkens politiske rolle og etiske spørsmål med tunisiske kollegaer. For et prosjekt av denne typen er norsk offentlighet å regne som «brukere». Begge de norske prosjektdeltakerne har bidratt med mange offentlige opptredener.

We ask a simple and fundamental question: how did media professionals in Egypt and Tunisia affect the transitions following the Arab uprisings? By studying and comparing three media channels (television, electronic news, and print) we explore how journalists made sense of confusing and contentious events, affecting elite and public perceptions of the transition process. The focus is on how journalists framed debates over religion and democracy and contributed to mitigate and exacerbate political polarization. The investigation is based on the premise that journalism is a key agency to make sense of the world, which becomes crucial in times of dramatic change. Approaching the issue of media and democratization from a new angle, we analyze and compare processes of journalistic interpretation, which in turn affect the direction of the transition process. 21st century struggles for democracy take place in a media-saturated environment where the media's rules of the game influence the crafting and functioning of political institutions. The project will theorize the media's role in political polarization in the contemporary Middle East and explain how mechanisms we know from media and communication research in the West play out in contexts of democratization. The project relies on extensive fieldwork in both countries, and textual analysis of selected news sources since the 2011 uprisings. Both main researchers read and speak Arabic fluently. The theoretical framework has previously not been applied in studies of the media in political transition processes, so the project promises to break new ground. The program moreover partners with the EU FP7 research program Media, Conflict and Democratisation, which addresses related research questions, and thereby contributes to significantly strengthen and internationalize Norwegian research.