Suchergebnisse

Recently, there has been a debate among Egyptian intellectuals about who ideally represents the Tahrir (liberation) revolutionaries. This article reflects on this debate with a focus on selected examples of middle-class liberal revolutionaries and their mediated accounts of the so-called Battle of Camel, which took place on 2 February 2011. The examples help illustrate how the mediation and construction of this event enforces the image of protestors as secular middle class, thereby relegating to the background the role played by religious groups such as the influential Muslim Brotherhood. The accounts also marginalized working-class voices, although this group significantly contributed to the success of the revolution. The selected examples indicate the dynamism of the protests as a multi-layered text and a cultural artefact, open to multiple interpretations with regard to the representation of the revolutionaries. Adapted from the source document.

The debate surrounding the coverage of the Iraq War in Arab and western news media has pinpointed the ethical role of the news media in the mediation of suffering. This article analyses the mechanism of mediating war in the front-page articles from four pan-Arab newspapers, printed during the war in 2003. The article draws on Boltanski's discussion of emotional politics or what he terms politics of pity, the aim of which is to trigger sympathy for the Other. The news texts included here are analysed according to their rhetorical strategies and to whether they aim at consolidating a certain ethical stance towards the war. Finally, the article attempts to answer the question of whether this coverage has contributed with rational arguments to the general public debate about the war, thereby fulfilling its role as mediator to the pan-Arab polity.

This article argues that despite the recent increase in the number of publications about Arab news media, little has been revealed about Arab journalism as a professional and social field.This article suggests the incorporation of Bourdieu's notion of "cultural intermediaries" and Zelizer's view of journalists as an "interpretive community" to re-conceptualize the role of Arab journalists, particularly in pan-Arab media. The article also provides a critical review of recent studies on Arab journalists, showing their shortcomings and their tendency to sidestep the analysis of power distribution among journalists. It provides examples of the themes that may guide this new research confining the discussion to pan-Arab media, particularly news satellite channels. It argues for seeing Arab journalists as an interpretive community, examining the way these journalists perceive their "professional identity" and how they define the power they share in their community of practitioners.