Beware the winter is coming! Arab Spring in the global media

ABSTRACT

This study critically examines how the global media uses the concept of revolution when reporting about the Arab Spring. The understanding of the concept informed by historical Western revolutionary events perpetuates Eurocentrism which continues the inability to comprehend the regional, cultural, and political peculiarities of the Arab Spring. Media framing analysis reveals the use of the outdated notions of revolution based on six common attributes. The concept of revolution defined by the six attributes fails to address the events because it is delimited by its own Western origin and with its own understanding of modernization and progress. Such use of the concept is maintained by the media but also affects perception of the events while de-emphasizing their revolutionary character.

KEYWORDS:

• Arab Spring
• revolution
• media discourse
• Eurocentrism

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Professor Alev Çinar and my colleagues Chien Yang Erdem, Jermaine S. Ma and Christina Hamer for their constructive comments and numerous discussions. This article is a part of the dissertation research conducted at Bilkent University.

Note on contributor

Petra Cafnik Uludağ is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Political Sciences and Public Administration, Bilkent University. Her work focuses on the politics of othering.

Notes

1 Currently, the term “Arab Spring” has become contested. For the purposes of this article, the author uses the term specifically because it is the term used in the media being analyzed.

2 When using the words “West” or “Western,” this text refers to Europe and countries of substantial European ancestral populations.

3 According to ComScore (ComScore, 2012), an IT company that measures global online activity, The New York Times has 48.7 million and The Guardian 39 million monthly readers accessing their content worldwide.

4 “Elite” sources are frequently cited by other media outlets because they are perceived as “good” and “reliable” news sources. They function as intermedia agenda setters that dictate what different forms of media talk about and how they talk about it (Christensen & Christensen, 2013; Meraz, 2009).

5 Intercoder reliability for all six variables corrected for agreement by chance (Kohen's Kappa) ranged from 1 to 0.61. The average ranging at 0.755. According to Landis and Koch (1977) this is substantial agreement between coders.

6 In the codebook of the analysis, the six frames were defined as follows: (1) Violence: established connection between the revolutionary events and violence, either by describing violent events and their outcomes or by stating the number of victims and causalities. (2) Public support: expressed local (regional or national) support for the events. The support can be expressed by an individual or a group. (3) Economic inequality: when implied that reasons for the events were economic or class based. (4) Fundamental changes: when stated that the Arab Spring inflicted changes in the social, cultural, religious, and political order of a state or region by introducing a certain fundamental novelty, such as gender equality or multiparty elections. (5) Destruction of long-standing regimes and principles: acknowledging the correlation between the events and their outcomes resulting in the destruction of the old power structures and ideologies. (6) New governments: reports about the changes in the governmental institutions brought about by elections and appointments of representatives.