What would an international public sphere look like?

Throughout Marc Lynch’s Voices of a New Arab Public, in which the author paints a portrait of the effect of new pan-Arab media sources such as Al Jazeera on Arab public opinion before and during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the idea of an international public sphere and what it would mean if it weren’t, in Lynch’s words, “weak,” keeps popping up.

The most obvious Iraq-related example of how a western and Arab public sphere were hopelessly disjointed is over the issue of the suffering of the Iraqi people at the hands of US and UK-enforced sanctions. In the Arab world, particularly through debate on chat shows on Al Jazeera, the facts on that particular issue were not only well known, but became woven into debates over the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, the relative tyranny of Saddam Hussein, and nearly everything else. Narratives of the Iraqi people already being victims of American interests in the region were long entrenched in the Middle East before any American policymaker suggested US forces might be “greeted as liberators” upon invasion, but consumers of the American (or possibly American/western)  media would not only have no way of knowing that identification with the suffering of Iraqis at the hands of Americans was nearly  as uniform as anything else in the region, they had no way of even knowing about a UNICEF report estimating the death of half a million Iraqi children as a result of the sanctions directed at the Iraqi regime.

This is  chiefly why Americans could not sell themselves as acting on the behalf of the Iraqi people, but without paying attention to the vibrant debate among Arabs about these facts, none of them would ever know it. Some of this must be put at the feet of the American and western news media for underreporting the effects of the strict sanctions on Iraq, and indeed more western public outrage might have made a difference. However, what is really shown here is not only ignorance of an uncomfortable fact, but an inability to understand and interpret smartly the internal debate going on inside a foreign public sphere. Indeed, this shows that the ins and outs of public opinion cannot translate currently from sphere to sphere. The international sphere is indeed weak.

But what I can’t put my finger on is what a true international public sphere would look like? Has one existed to any extent before? Some western news sources (BBC World News for example) do a good job of covering much of the world not discussed in the public sphere facilitated by US cable news for example, but is that the same as portraying how large trends, stories, and news narratives are interpreted differently in different places? Does international media consolidation in the hands of fewer people make an international public sphere more or less likely? Does new media create understanding across borders, or push people closer to a niche of information they want? I’ve been grappling with these questions, let me know if you have, too.

On the Opposition to Al Jazeera English

Anyone following events in Tunisia and Egypt and subsequently Bahrain, Libya, Yemen and elsewhere has detected a debate looming over the events themselves, one which I think ought not be dismissed, because it is indicative of a larger trend in media.

Al Jazeera has used its seriously comprehensive  coverage of Egyptian protests (featuring reporters who seemingly never sleep) as its moment to not only assert its primacy and reliability among news organizations in the region, but to portray Al Jazeera English as an invaluable resource to the English-speaking world. AJE has been promoting its tweet reminding viewers that live coverage is available through live blog or live video coverage online since early in the protests, and is using the opportunity to start a grassroots movement among its US watchers to tell their cable providers to provide AJE as part of one of their programming options (none of them currently do) with the #demandaljazeera promoted hashtag.

From the #demandaljazeera tweets and other comments on articles I’ve read related to Al Jazeera or media coverage of the Middle East, the consensus seems to be that cable providers in the US are bowing to government political pressure by not offering AJE, although that’s never been a stated reason. Certainly, the Bush Administration’s relentless criticism of Al Jazeera during the Iraq War, as documented by Marc Lynch, would suggest that a climate has been created in which AJE could be a tricky thing for any provider to be the first to offer. The fact that Al Jazeera English was founded explicitly as an alternative to the status quo of news and that it sought to “reverse the north to south flow of information” serve only to feed into the fears of Americans already predisposed to be skeptical of it.

Jillian C. York’s post about criticisms of Al Jazeera’s coverage of CBS reporter Lara Logan’s rape in Cairo goes to show that US commentators now use any occasion to accentuate even small differences between Al Jazeera’s coverage of an event and Western coverage.  The sad reality for American media is that Al Jazeera probably does a better job of covering the issue of rape in depth and around the world than American media do.  During the coverage of Tunisia, Al Jazeera was criticized (hilariously) for having an anti-authoritarian bias. Jillian York rightly points out that you’d be hard pressed to find a single publication or news outlet in America that didn’t have an even stronger anti-authoritarian bias.

I think there is a certain amount of simple xenophobia and following of the Bush Administration’s lead in US criticism and fear of the power of Al Jazeera. I think what that masks, however, is a real fear on behalf of an American news media which has long had a hegemony over consumption of foreign news. The great fear of the NBCs and CNNs of the world is that consumers will rebel over the quality of most mainstream news, and those with an interest in world news will watch Al Jazeera English and get domestic news from blogs or some other combination of practices which will make an all-encompassing mainstream domestic news behemoth obsolete. Am I right in detecting this motive, or does anti-AJE mood stem from something else entirely?

More Thoughts on Turkey and Secularism

Ever since reading Haroon Moghul’s thoughts on Western fantasies of secularism in the Tunisian revolution, I’ve been thinking about the ways in which the word secular can be problematic and simplistic in labeling any group of people or any government. As the readings from this week show, Turkey is an excellent example of this.

According to Moghul, the West seems to Orientalize Islam as an inherently political, groupthink-creating religion the way it does not do other religions: “We still can’t seem to get past this confusion of personal belief with political order, especially since Islam is such a visible religion, and our idea of religiosity assumes that what is visible cannot be uncoerced (and uncoercive).” Turkey, the author rightly states, is an interesting counterexample. Referring to the current government, he writes: “a popular, democratically elected party, many of whose members are individually pious, is using the ballot box to push an unelected secular elite out of its privileged statist position.”

In other important ways, Western projections of Western secularism fail when alluding of Turkey. Ataturk’s Republic was designed to be specifically secular. In practice, that has not meant that the government stays out of the religion business altogether, in fact mosque construction and religious education payed for with public money have never seemed out of bounds. Part of Turkish nationalism has focused on a supposedly common Sunni identity as fundamental to this narrow Turkishness as ethnicity or language. What has made Turkey secular is the discouragement (sometimes by Army force) of “political Islam” as practiced by the more recently influential Islamic Welfare Party. The line Turkey draws between acceptable nationalistically-minded pride in Sunni Islam and dangerous if democratic elements with more strictly Islamic goals is clearly a thin one which changes slightly with the times, and in the US and Western Europe (because of various factors) there is nothing near an equivalent.

Drawing the weeks readings together, I see a connection between understandings of Turkish secularism and the nation’s chances of accession to the European Union. Aside from concerns about Turkey’s illiberal oppression of ethnic minorities, Bassam Tibi seems to think that objection to Turkey as European comes in some part from knee-jerk reactions which are more about whether a majority Muslim country can fit in with a now very vague definition of the “European civilization”  which is both Christian in heritage and progressive and indeed also secular. Fears about this appear to fit in with western understandings of Islam as inherently political (and politically oppressive) which seem to be undermined by the variety of political uses that Islam has and has had in within the Turkish nation-state, including, I think, the recent democratic challenges to an oppressive secular status quo.

Am I right that there’s a tie between Europe’s understanding of Turkey and its understanding of secularism within the Islamic world?

What is a Blog?

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I would like to eschew a practical discussion of the definition of a blog  or a history of blogging, something someone with my level of expertise on the writing end of blogging wouldn’t be able to with any kind of insight beyond rehashing a wikipedia article (which seems itself overly diplomatic), and instead share what distinguishes the experience of reading a blog, in my opinion, from getting information from most sources.

I. Specificity

A common thread among the blogs I come across and come back to is a certain specificity of topic, regardless of the number of writers. A favorite of mine, for example, is TELEVISUAL, a blog from Aymar Jean Christian at UPenn. It tackles contemporary American pop culture from a critical and academic standpoint with a focus on representation of historically disadvantaged groups. That’s a topic that won’t appeal to many, but that can be an advantage in that it can produce a community of commenters with those narrow interests who have a mutual interest in keeping conversation at a high, relevant level. Even a personal blog from someone with a wide area of interests must have some topics onto which it returns fairly regularly so as to keep readers (who aren’t the author’s friends) from coming back.  Yes, a blog topic can be too specific. For example, a blog about a single movie or book’s influence on culture might not be able to update often with quality posts as one with a slightly broader outlook.

An example of a blog which I have no incentive to return frequently because its topic is too broad for me to know if I’m interested in on a daily basis would be a breaking news blog on a major newspaper website. It can’t develop a signature theme or tone since its focus is on breaking the news rather than on delving deeper into issues behind them. These tend to have lower quality interactivity between writers and readers and the writing tends to  read just like the news on the rest of the site, which seems to defeat its purpose.

II. Tone/Partiality

As I just alluded to, there seems to be something off about a blog post which has the same stiff tone as a wire report in a newspaper. When journalism particularly is undertaken in a blog, it is expected to come along with a distinctive voice, which covers both tone and also a pre-established worldview. When I took New Media and Society whilst abroad in England we covered critiques of new media journalism, and specifically blogs, extensively. The amount of credence given to blog journalism from mainstream journalists citing sources particularly is a contentious issue, because for many the word ‘blog’ implies a certain amount of partiality and a distinct lack of formality or professionalism. Whether this is a valid concern is debatable, I would only contend that blogs function best when they exist alongside traditional media in something of a symbiotic relationship.

III. Interactivity

A devoted, but still diverse, readership of a well maintained blog hopefully makes for constructive commenting and ideally frequent interaction between writers and readers which lends a more communal air to the blogosphere while still allowing writers control of the topic and tone of their blogs. Interactivity via comments is one of the reasons why blogs seem to bridge what one might call an “authority gap” between writer and reader which makes reading something sometimes feel distant. Blogs are unique in having comments now less than ever, and it would be interesting to investigate how the presence of comments on newspaper articles, for example, has or has not affected their content and made it more similar to the content, tone etc. of blogs. A difference I still see on full-fledged blogs rather than on other kinds of online publications is a high level of interaction between commenters and the original writer which extends the “authority” of the post into the comments section.

Speaking of which, won’t you interact with me below the line? Is my idea of a blog decent or way off?

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