Abstract
While the role of the evolving media technologies in the events of the Arab Spring has attracted significant attention among media scholars, research on the impact of the media in the Colour Revolutions remains scarce. As Simon Gwyn Roberts rightly points out, this is an unfortunate omission and a manifestation of a rather selective geopolitical focus of media and communications research – but also, we could add, a symptom of the field’s relentless emphasis on the newest technological developments at the expense of longitudinal analysis and informed historical comparisons. Roberts’ book is a welcome corrective to these trends, and shows that many of the trends noted in the Arab Spring – above all the ideal of media freedom, but also the ‘networked’ nature of political protest and its dependence on online media – have clear counterparts in the Colour Revolutions, even though the digital media environment at the time was centred primarily on online news platforms rather than social media such as Facebook or Twitter.
Roberts’ study offers a comparative account that covers the three Colour Revolutions – Georgia’s ‘Rose Revolution’ in 2003, Ukraine’s ‘Orange Revolution’ in 2004 and Kyrgyzstan’s ‘Tulip Revolution’ in 2005 – as well as Armenia’s earlier wave of protests in 1996. The empirical basis consists of a set of interviews conducted with online and mainstream journalists from the four countries in 2011 and 2012. The opening chapters situate the study within the broader discussions about the political impact of online journalism, provide an overview of the key characteristics of media environments, political trajectories and journalistic cultures in the four countries, and outline the methodological approach and challenges and opportunities involved in conducting comparative research. This is followed by an account of journalists’ responses to three key questions tackled in interviews: the barriers to conventional journalism; the relationship between online news media and mainstream politics and the press; and the portrayal of minority groups in the media.
The most significant conclusion derived from the interviews is the identification of news ‘hub’ websites – namely, digital portals that utilize a combination of social media and blogs – as key media actors of the Colour Revolutions. Such websites, argues Roberts, were used to ‘plug a gap in the public sphere which cannot be filled by a deficient mainstream press fatally compromised by lack of funds’ (p. ix), and acted as catalysts of public debate and protests for the politically active segments of the population. Drawing on the analysis of the Colour Revolutions as well as post-revolutionary developments, Roberts offers a cautiously optimistic account of the potential of new media technologies in expanding the limits of public debate, at least in the context of semi-democratic political regimes. While acknowledging that the shifts brought by the Colour Revolutions have not been quite as ground-breaking as initially envisaged, he nevertheless emphasizes that digital media provided opportunities for significant, if incremental changes. Arguably, this potential stems largely from the fact that the ‘hub’ websites were typically detached from the mainstream press, and explicitly set up as alternative sources of news and debate – as opposed to the western media environment, where the main web news portals are usually attached to the mainstream press.
Even though Roberts’ conclusions are interesting, one cannot help feeling that they do not quite do justice to the wealth of material collected. The empirical chapters are largely descriptive and reliant on lengthy quotes from interviews with only limited analysis. While this is perhaps understandable given that Roberts’ stated aim is to provide a ‘snapshot’ of the role of online journalism in the contemporary post-Soviet political environment, one would hope that he would have continued to engage with the materials to push the key arguments further. One possible avenue lies in exploiting the comparative design of the study to seek explanations for different outcomes of the Colour Revolutions – is it possible to argue that they had to do with differences in the setup, content and audiences of ‘hub’ websites, or are they largely an outcome of contextual, cultural and political differences between the four states? A more elaborated comparison with western cases would also be useful, and could provide the basis for a more universally applicable, ‘de-westernized’ account of the political role of online journalism. Finally, Roberts’ initial notes about the similarities and continuities with the Arab Spring also suggest the need for a longer genealogy of the changing nature of protest and its relationships with information and communication technologies, which would stretch beyond the relatively short history of digital media and engage with earlier modes of communication.