Al-Jazeera's Democratizing Role and the Rise of Arab Public Sphere Submitted by Ezzeddine Abdelmoula to the University of Exeter as a thesis for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Politics in July 2012 This thesis is available for Library use on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement I certify that all material in this thesis which is not my own work has been identified and that no material has previously been submitted and approved for the award of a degree by this or any other University Signature ………………………………… 1 Dedication To my wife Rachida and my sons Haytham, Ilyas and Anas Thank you to my mother and father, who brought me up to be who I am 2 Abstract More than sixteen years have passed since the launch of the Qatar-based Al Jazeera news channel. Looking back, the state of Arab media and its relationship with the political sphere was different from what we see nowadays. The launch of Al Jazeera in 1996 was a significant event that led to subsequent changes both in the media and politics. Among these changes, the Arab spring, which started in Tunisia in December 2010, is certainly the most remarkable one. This ongoing event has already resulted in the fall of four dictatorships and is expected to unleash a democratization wave and reshape the face of the Arab region. This research analyzes the Al Jazeera democratizing effect and looks at the political implications of the new Arab public sphere. In doing so, it seeks to fill a gap in the existing literature, which tends to ignore the Arab world that remains largely under- researched. Contrary to the top-down approach inherent in the dominant narratives on democratization, that pay almost no attention to the growing role of the media in political change, I adopted a bottom-up approach arguing that, particularly in the Arab setting, it has become almost impossible to separate changes in the media landscape from those in the political field. The Arab spring provides us with a telling empirical example where this interplay is remarkably manifest. In this context, Arab democratization is no longer an abstract; it is rather a developing process that needs our attention and requires concerted scholarly efforts. To develop an original approach to understanding Arab democratization and analyze its complex dynamics, I used grounded theory and its powerful tools in theory building. Based on this theoretical framework I opted for qualitative methodology to elaborate the empirical part of this research, which consists primarily of analyzing and interpreting 3 in-depth interviews conducted with a sample of Al Jazeera’s staff in various managerial and editorial positions. 4 Table of Contents Dedication 2 Abstract 3 Chapter 1: Literature review 8 1. Research question and rationale 8 2. Literature review: a critical assessment 11 Chapter 2: Research methodology 70 1. Data collection and analysis 73 2. Chapter synopsis 78 Chapter 3: Democratization: The frameworks, the narratives and the Arab dilemma 86 1. Inadequacies of the dominating democratization 88 2. The struggle for Arab democratization: forces, discourses and the indigenous voices 94 3. Political Culture: why does it matter? 108 4. Bringing the international factor back-in 122 Chapter 4: Beyond the systemic approach: Al Jazeera reshaping the media - politics relationship 128 1. Defining and contextualizing the systemic approach to the media – politics relationship 129 2. Rethinking the systemic approach 136 3. Beyond the systemic approach: Al Jazeera, a non-systemic phenomenon 142 5 Chapter 5: The Arab public sphere in the context of the current debate 149 1. The bourgeois public sphere: social structures and political functions 151 2. The public sphere: the rise and decline of democratic politics 155 3. Habermas's conception of the public sphere: a critical assessment 158 4. After The Structural Transformation, Habermas re-conceptualizes the public sphere 166 5. Al Jazeera, new media and the rise of Arab public sphere 172 Chapter 6: Al Jazeera: democratizing through the public sphere 179 1. Al Jazeera's role in the emergence of the Arab Public Sphere 180 2. Characteristics and defining features of the new Arab public sphere 200 Chapter 7: Al Jazeera's democratization effect 211 1. Towards Arab democratization: changing the media landscape 214 2. Breaking the information monopoly 222 3. The opinion and the other opinion 226 4. Old and new media: from competition to complementarity 232 Chapter 8: Televising the Arab spring: real-time democratization? 238 1. The Arab spring: the context and the processes 240 2. Framing the Arab spring: the vision and the editorial policy 246 3. Covering the Arab spring: differences and similarities 250 4. Al Jazeera's revolution? 261 Chapter 9: Al Jazeera’s democratizing effect: a critical assessment of a success story 264 1. Why has Al Jazeera covered Bahrain differently? 267 6 2. Covering Libya: the danger in using embedded journalism 275 3. A shrinking space for 'the opinion and the other opinion' 278 4. The Arab spring and the transformation of the Arab public sphere 282 Conclusions 287 Bibliography 303 Appendix: List of interviews 315 7 Chapter 1: Literature Review 1. Research question and rationale What is the impact of Al Jazeera's paradigmatic change in the media-politics relationship on Arab democratization? How has Al Jazeera contributed to the creation of an Arab public sphere? These key questions articulate my research analytical agenda and will be examined in the following context. The successive democratization waves that swept across the globe during the last four decades generated a rich body of literature exploring and comparing processes, attitudes and outcomes. In the context of these phenomenal changes, many transitions to democratic governance took place in Europe, Latin America, Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa; the one region that seemed to be lagging behind is the Middle East in general and the Arab world in particular. Accordingly, very few scholarly works focused on this region to explore the dynamics of social and political change and question the seemingly resistance of Arab political systems to democratization. Looking at the situation through the lens of the top-down dominating narratives can only capture segments of the scene but not the whole picture. The apparent stalled democratic change in the Arab world should not obscure the deep, long-term and open-ended processes involving a widening circle of non-state, non-institutionalized and non-elite actors. In this respect, the struggle for Arab democratization is better understood when local realities and specific contexts 8 are taken into account. Among these realities is the growing influence of previously marginalized, excluded and unheard voices. Besides, there is the noticeable growing role of transnational satellite television and online media, with all that it offers in terms of connectivity and flow of uncensored information. As the media have always played a significant role in facilitating change in certain circumstances and reinforcing the status-quo in others, and since the Arab world has seen an unprecedented surge of media activity in the last fifteen years led by the Qatar-based Al Jazeera network, there is a need to rethink the democratizing role of the media in the Arab setting. This research is a contribution to the ongoing debate over the nature and scope of the Al Jazeera effect in a region where democratic politics seems to be going nowhere, at least until before the Arab spring. It is not my aim here to prove or disprove whether Al Jazeera is a democratizing agent. I will rather explore the ways in which this new phenomenon has redefined the spheres of public communication and how these emerging spheres are reshaping peoples' relations to their political systems and affecting the power relations between the rulers and the ruled. My aim therefore, is to fill the gap in the existing literature on Arab democratization, which either neglected or placed very little emphasis on the role of the media and the non-political elites. By giving those actors a platform for public discussion and providing its cross-sectional audiences with unprecedented access to information, Al Jazeera has created a new media paradigm that is increasingly affecting both democratic and anti-democratic discourses in the region. The political dimension of this platform, where government officials, 9 opposition figures, civil society activists, academics and professionals from different backgrounds interact freely and show their agreements and disagreements on issues of general concern is what characterizes the debate mediated by this new media paradigm that is Al Jazeera. The more this debate assumes clear political functions and includes wider social strata, the weaker the stronghold of Arab autocratic regimes over public opinion and choices will be. It is through this complex and dialectical relation of intertwined advancements and drawbacks that democratic struggles in the region will be analyzed. Addressing Arab democratization from this perspective is therefore, never straightforward or unproblematic. Drawing on the existing literature on democratization theory, media-politics relationship, the public sphere, and Al Jazeera, I propose to break down my research key questions into the following set of sub-questions which will articulate my analysis and guide my research agenda: 1. To what extent are the dynamics of social and political change in the Arab world "specific" and "particular" in a way that requires the development of an alternative theoretical approach to Arab democratization? 2. Can we build on the intellectual tradition of critical theory, especially the formulations of Habermas on the communicative action, the public sphere, and deliberative democracy to understand the impact of Al Jazeera on the changing relations between Arab media and politics? 11 3.