Alexa Robertson

Connecting in Crisis: “Old” and “New” Media and the Arab Spring

When political unrest spread from Tunisia to neighboring countries early in 2011, established global broadcasters were quick to provide commentary on the part played by social media in mobilizing dissent, exploiting the same technology in their own reporting of the protests as they did so. In this article, the relation of “old” to “new” media is explored in a comparison of televised coverage of the Arab Spring in Al Jazeera English, Russia Today, CNN International, and British Broadcasting Corporation World (BBCW) News. Building on notions of mediapolis and connectivity and mediatized crisis, it seeks to map the shared communicative space opened up by global broadcasters, and how established media actors are adapting to new media ecologies. The empirical analysis shows that social media do not play the prominent role in global television discourse one might expect, and that their prominence and deployment vary from one channel to the other.

Atlas reports: Global television constructions of economic crisis

The setting of Rand’s dystopic classic Atlas Shrugged is a world in which people revolt against their governments and refuse to bow to attempts to regulate the economy. Rand borrowed the title for her 1957 paean to the philosophy of ‘objectivism’ from Greek mythology, and the name of the giant who bore the world on his shoulders. This article analyses the work of actors who carry the world in their broadcasts, rather than on their shoulders, and whose philosophy is a professional one of objectivity. It compares representations of crisis by broadcasters anchored in different parts of the global communicative sphere, with different financing solutions and relations to political power. The results show that not all global broadcasters are alike – or, for that matter, global in their narrative strategies. The differences between the four newsrooms’ reporting suggest a need for critical reconsideration of generalising claims made in the scholarly literature about how crises are depicted in global media, and particularly those about ‘homogenization’ and which see global news in terms of infotainment.