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In other words, while media might have

the power to define the periphery of

public opinion, the centre remains the

domain of the recipient.

Public Opinion, the Media and the Arab Spring: Has Decades of

Media Research Been in Vain?By S.A.B. (17.04.2011)

The recent events across the Middle East and

North Africa has led to a resurgence of the belief

that true bottom-up revolutionary change is

possible even in nations governed by the most

iron-fisted and despotic rulers. A wave of protests

that emanated from Tunisia starting late last year

has led to the toppling of Mubarak in Egypt, a civil

war Libya and large scale uprisings and

subsequent violent military crackdowns in

Bahrain, Syria and Yemen. A great deal of

attention has also been paid to the so-called tools

of the revolution, namely the social mediawebsites that have allowed

protesters to organize and

coalesce their movements

into vehicles of meaningful

change. The actual influence

of these new media tools is

still a matter of some

dispute. Malcolm Gladwell

ignited a controversy when he published a piece in

the New Yorker (October 4th

, 2010) arguing againstthe suggested role of the media as fundamental

enablers of social change. The impact of traditional

media has also drawn its share of attention,

particularly from the rulers of countries where

protests are still on-going. Perhaps most affected

in this regard is the broadcast news network Al

Jazeera, which has suffered numerous

interruptions to service in countries were it was

providing coverage of the protests, including

Egypt and Libya. In Egypt, the authorities forced

Al Jazeeras local news bureau to close down by

revoking its broadcast license and the press

accreditation of all journalists. In early January, the

New York Times published an article about Al

Jazeeras role in the Arab unrest which quoted

Marc Lynch, a professor of Middle East Studies as

saying that the notion that there is a common

struggle across the Arab world is something that

Al Jazeera helped create and while they may not

have caused these events its almost

impossible to imagine all this happening withoutAl Jazeera.

That media might play a significant role in

moulding public opinion is an idea that has been

around since the very inception of the traditional

news formats. For example, it was taken for

granted that someone exposed to a propaganda

message would experience precisely the message

intended by its creator. Also known as transmission

belt theory, this line of thought was eventually

modified to accommodate the insight that there

may be certain variables which might alter the

intended meaning of the message compared to the

meaning perceived by the individual. To a largeextent these early ideas about

the effects of mass media and

propaganda were actually

transmogrified versions of

theories found in instinctual

psychology. They postulated

that human beings all had a

relatively uniform set of

driving mechanisms which, if actuated, would result

in relatively similar behaviour. This so-calledstimulus-response model of mass media effect

remained the reigning paradigm in journalism and

media research for many years. A paradigm shift

occurred with a seemingly simple reversal of the

question that media researchers had originally

been pursuing. The decisive question was not

How do the media influence people? but rather,

How do people use the media?. This theoretical

about-face was spurred in part by the findings of

Herbert Blumler and George Herbert Mead and a

particular strain of sociological thought known as

symbolic interactionism. The central tenet of this

theory as stipulated by Blumler, was that people

act toward things on the basis of the meaning

they ascribe to those things. No longer could

researchers consider recipients to simply be

impassive subjects with unguarded and entirely

malleable opinions and attitudes. Instead, research

now had to focus on precisely how media were

being used, by whom and for what purpose an

altogether more complex endeavour.

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That the coverage of the Arab uprisings

goes beyond purely relative value to the

viewer is in fact a rather bold

assumption with numerous empirically

sustained counterclaims.

Eventually, major pieces of empirical research

began to demonstrate that the effects of mass

media were nowhere near as linear and

mechanistic as formerly suggested by the

stimulus-response model. A study entitled The

Peoples Choice conducted by Paul Lazarsfeld onhow voters make up their opinion in presidential

campaigns put forth several conclusions that

initially seemed to be somewhat counter-factual,

particularly at the time when

the study was conducted

(during the late 1940s).

Lazarsfeld suggested that

those individuals exposed

most to the mass media were

actually the least likely tochange their political

opinions. The reasoning

behind this finding was simple. It was argued that

those most likely to consume mass media content

related to the elections were also most likely to

already have a firm and established opinion about

the issues at hand. The study further asserted that

changes in political opinion were most likely

precipitated by contacts between people rather

than by the consumption of mass media messages.

Another important piece of media research was

published by McCombs and Shaw in what is

known as the Chapel Hill Study. Their findings

indicated that media were not particularly

successful at telling people what to think about

certain issues, but they were surprisingly effective

at dictating which issues people think about. In other

words, while media might have the power to

define the periphery of public opinion, the centre

still remains the domain of the recipient.

However, reports about government reprisals and

backlashes against media outlets in Middle East

and North Africa almost make it seem as if the

belief in the medias omnipotence has never been

questioned. Even the Western medias appraisal of

the situation, as evidenced by the article in the

New York Times, seems to be sufficiently wide of

the mark as to warrant criticism. Publishing a

quote suggesting that the unrest in the Arab World

would be less intense or less widespread were it

not for the efforts of single broadcast news

network contributes to an exaggerated

understanding of the medias role in these events .

The reasons behind the uprisings existed in these

countries long before they started receiving media

attention. At most, coverage of the events could be

said to have contributed the last drop in the

barrel which then subsequently spilled over intopolitical protests. To borrow a notion from radical

constructivist thinking, we know that it is

impossible to meaningfully separate between the

subject and the real world.

It follows that personal

realities, and therefore also

the realities constructed by

journalists are not

representations of reality but

rather interpretations of it.And not only is journalism

itself an interpretative

endeavour, but so too is its perception by the

audience. The images of the unrest appearing on

television and computer screens throughout the

Arab World are valuable to those who see them

precisely because they are already involved. That

the coverage of the Arab uprisings goes beyond

purely relative value to the viewer is in fact a

rather bold assumption with numerous

empirically sustained counterclaims. Of course

this is by no means intended to suggest that

empirical findings are infallible, and even less so

that only the empirically verifiable may be the sole

criterion of truth. Instead, the aforementioned

studies should be considered the necessary context

for understanding the effects of mass media on

public opinion, particularly when one wishes to

ascribe to the media any kind of constitutive role

in social happenings.

Yet the tendency to view the media as an

omnipotent entity is in fact very widespread. At a

recent hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations

Committee, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton

spoke about which she described as an

information war and how it was changing

peoples minds and attitudes.

[There are] a set of global networks that

Al Jazeera has been the leader in [!] that are

literally changing peoples minds and

attitudes, and like it or hate it, it is reallyeffective. In fact, viewership in Al Jazeera is

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By circumscribing the mediasinvolvement in social happenings with

the term narrative, the linear and

mechanistic understanding of media

influence is lifted and a sense of

variability is imparted on the reader.

going up in the United States because it is

real news. You may not agree with it, but

you feel like you are getting real news

around the clock instead of a million

commercials.

- U.S. Secretary of State, Hillary ClintonThis quote is significant for a variety of reasons,

not all of which can be touched upon in this

article. While Secretary Clinton did not specify

precisely what she means with the term

effective, her statement places very strong

emphasis on the medias role in influencing public

opinion. She then goes on to cite the growing

number of government sponsored television news

channels around the world

that might constitute thebelligerents in this proposed

information war. Indeed

China (CNTV) and Russia (RT

Television) do both have

English language television

news programs that are

available worldwide and

which are slowly gaining

prominence. If anything, it seems that belief in the

medias influence on public sentiment has gained

rather than diminished since the early days of

public opinion research. From this it is possible to

surmise what the Secretary might have meant with

her statement pertaining to the effectiveness of

these foreign news media. Effectiveness, it can be

argued, might be understood as the degree to

which media can influence policies and decision

making. Global public opinion is generally

recognized also as being important domestically,

and has received increased attention of late from

government offices dedicated to shaping theglobal perception of U.S. foreign policy. What

Secretary Clinton is suggesting is that the media,

through its power to mould the narrative, exerts

an influence considerable enough to be felt within

even the highest decision making circles. The

media war then, from which the U.S. is currently

absent, is a battle concerned primarily with the

ability to define and delimit. The media has the

power to define the important issues and delimit

policy makers freedom of movement within these

issues. In short, the media is capable of

determining decision viability.

That media might be able to define the narrative is

an idea also present in the aforementioned New

York Times article about Al Jazeera. This

characterization of media involvement is far more

befitting to the role the media most likely play in

social unrest and is also largely consistent withprevious empirical findings. By circumscribing the

medias involvement in social happenings with the

term narrative, the linear and mechanistic

understanding of media influence is lifted and a

sense of variability is imparted on the reader. In

this case, a narrative can be understood as a

framework designed to determine only the most

protuberant facets of a story. The detail work, as

well as the assignment of

meaning is left to therecipient. In some ways, this

conclusion may seem to be a

return to what McCombs

and Shaw refer to as the

agenda setting function of

the mass media. It must

again be mentioned that the

point of this article is not to

grant empirical findings supremacy or to profess

their superiority. Rather, it is to point out that

granting the media omnipotence does not fit

within the current communications research

paradigm, which first and foremost stresses the

essentiality of the recipient. Further, it must also

be made clear that it is not this authors intent to

stifle science paradigm shifts, which represent

scientific progress can only occur through the

discovery of anomalies. However, the notion of

omnipotent media represents the return to a

paradigm that has long since been overhauled,

and therefore must be kept in check.

Cited Articles

I. Seizing a Moment, Al Jazeera Galvanizes Arab Frustration

[http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/28/world/middleeast/2

8jazeera.html](15.04.2011)