Zurich Open Repository and Archive University of Zurich Main Library Strickhofstrasse 39 CH-8057 Zurich www.zora.uzh.ch Year: 2016 Censorship of the Arab Spring in MENA media Ciocan, Dumitru ; Wüest, Bruno Abstract: The press should ideally be the eyes, ears and voice of the public in any state. However, freedom of the press varies across states and is especially lacking in autocratic ones. This paper asks how the press in autocracies tackles the challenge of reporting on contentious mobilization, i.e. protests events that threaten the very survival of the regime. For this, it relies on count and structural topic models applied to an original dataset of roughly half a million newspaper articles published before and after the events of the Arab Spring (January 2009 – December 2011), and on new protest event data from the Mass Mobilizations in Autocracies Dataset. We find that both the extent of coverage and its content is influenced by the overall degree of censorship in MENA countries. Moreover, threats to authoritarian regimes, measured both as intensity of domestic protests and intensity of protests across the wider MENA region, also influence the coverage of the issue. We also find that these effects are stronger forstateowned newspapers. Posted at the Zurich Open Repository and Archive, University of Zurich ZORA URL: https://doi.org/10.5167/uzh-143872 Conference or Workshop Item Originally published at: Ciocan, Dumitru; Wüest, Bruno (2016). Censorship of the Arab Spring in MENA media. In: European Political Science Association. Annual Meeting, Brussels, 23 June 2016 - 25 June 2016. CENSORSHIP OF THE ARAB SPRING IN MENA MEDIA DUMITRU CIOCAN BRUNO WUEEST University of Zurich University of Zurich
[email protected] [email protected] Paper prepared for presentation at the 6th Annual General Conference of the European Political Science Association 23-25 June 2016 Brussels Abstract The press should ideally be the eyes, ears and voice of the public in any state.