Abstract
Media Power and Global Television News articulates that the development of satellite news broadcasting such as Al-Jazeera English (AJE) has contributed to the realization of a mediated “global public sphere” bridging the gap between the Middle East voices and the “Oriental” discourse. In the words of Saba Bebawi, the book aims
to uncover the nature of the global satellite news space and relations of media power through the case study of Al-Jazeera, in order to understand the extent to which it plays a role in bridging the gap between the Arab Sphere and the “global public Sphere.” (p. 7)
Though the book delves into a majority of available literature, it ignores a few critical works such as Ezzeddine Abdelmoula (2015) who examines Al-Jazeera’s (AJ) role in media democratization efforts in Arab Public Sphere. Bebawi reads through the Arab Spring and utilizes the Habermasian idea of the public sphere, problematizing the existing idea. The book adds to the existing scholarship articulating that the emergence of satellite news networks such as AJE has posed a challenge to the supremacy of Western global media discourse.
The book is divided into five chapters. First being the introduction outlines the framework of the book and discusses concepts such as media power, public sphere, international media channels, and so on. The second chapter on “News Networks and the ‘Global Public Sphere’” scrutinizes the ideas of public spheres by Jurgen Habermas, Todd Gitlin’s sphere of transforming the role of civil society due to changing technology and Nancy Fraser’s concept of counter-public spheres. It further delves into the history of media imperialism and how it impacts the flow and counter-flow of the global.
In the third chapter “Al-Jazeera as ‘Alterative,’” Bebawi attempts to carve out a possible definition of alterative media and how AJE fits into that definition. She argues that Arab public sphere has transformed from national to global sphere owing to the growth and development of AJ network and articulates that this has democratized news collection and dissemination. Bebawi draws upon many of the existing works to prove her point but does not engage with critical writings on AJ such as Tine Ustad Figenschou (2014) who delineates the challenges faced by the AJ and argues that it is taking a middle position in war and conflict reporting in order to become a global player.
The fourth chapter on “Discursive Media Power” engages with her methodological approach and explains the rationale for choosing critical discourse analysis to study the media power variable of AJE and the fifth chapter elaborates the chosen case studies to substantiate the research. Bebawi adopts Van Dijk’s (1985) thematic structure method of deletion, generalization, and reconstruction to construct a relative theme among various channels opted for comparison, that is, BBC, CNNI, and AJE. This methodology is useful for bridging the gaps between micro-level and macro-level approaches to textual analysis. She picks up the case studies of kidnapping of a BBC journalist in—and Libya’s HIV case in—to analyze the media coverage of satellite channels before the Arab Spring. She took two other different case studies of mass death sentences pronounced against the Muslim brotherhood members in Egypt in—and the Syria UN veto coverage in. The outcome of these cases reveals a pattern, according to the author, which signifies the differential pattern of coverage between AJE and the CNN and BBC. The problem is, it leads to generalization and the argument that AJ has emerged as a dominant global news network which should be backed with further examples and an in-depth study of its audience reception over a period of time. This lack of engagement with target audience interests and focus group representation is a major drawback of the work.
Bebawi concludes her findings by explaining the forces that help in the creation of the discursive media power, that is, news sourcing, nature of media organizations and its relation with audiences, and lastly the culture of journalism on reporting practices. She takes due consideration of the sources of origin of news stories and objectively studies them and takes into consideration online sources of news origin. Further, Bebawi examines various cultures of journalism that exist at global level which marks the difference in reporting patterns. The book is an encapsulation of the ideas regarding media power in a hegemonic framework, though the work could have been enriched with the concepts like media hegemony and their role in media democratization framework, especially after the Arab Spring from where the author draws the core study samples. This could help scholars grasp better essence of changes in media reporting patterns post-Arab Spring. Furthermore, the book could have carved out a niche readership for itself when it talks about media power and AJE, primarily because the present framework deals with the subject only in a textbook manner and not as a reference book.