Bullets and Bulletins: Media and Politics in the Wake of the Arab Uprisings.

• Author: Ghanem, Hiba
• Position: Book review

Bullets and Bulletins: Media and Politics in the Wake of the Arab Uprisings Edited by Mohamed Zayani and Suzi Mirgani London: Hurst Publishers, 2016, 256 pages, [pounds sterling]25, ISBN: 9781849045643

Research on the role that the media has played in the Arab uprisings highlights the liberating potential of the media as a medium for self-expression and democratization. However, little research has focused on questioning the premises and the theories which are adopted to frame this research. This is the concern addressed in Bullets and Bulletins: Media and Politics in the Wake of the Arab Uprisings. This edited volume critically evaluates the conceptual framework that research adopts to explore the development of a public sphere within the Arab World.

The book is introduced by two chapters written by the editors, Suzi Mirgani and Mohamad Zayani, respectively. In "The State of Arab Media in the Wake of the Arab Uprisings," Mirgani highlights how social-media reflects the developing liberation of Arab media from state control during the uprisings. Following this introduction, the first part of the book, entitled "Arab Media in Transition," consists of three chapters that review the historically contextualized reading of this topic. In "On the Entangled Question of Media and Politics in the Middle East," Zayani explores how the contemporary Arab world rewrites the notion of the "political" through cultural practice, whether through direct political contestation or digital participation (p. 34). Zayani highlights the role that transnational satellite channels, specifically Al Jazeera, have played in this process.

In the following chapter, "A Comparative Analysis of Traditional Media Industry Transitions in Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt," Fatima el Issawi critically evaluates whether the evolution of popular engagement with the media is really reflective of the democratization of the media. In a quest for a culturally-contextualized study, el Issawi conducts semi-structured interviews with media practitioners in traditional mass media industries in Libya, Egypt and Tunisia. El Issawi concludes that in all these countries, journalists have failed to assume an active role in monitoring the political sphere because of the absence of democratic institutions that can protect them.

The historically-revisionist reading in this part of the book, however, is concluded by a chapter that is more descriptive than critical. In "The Culture of Arab Journalism,"...