Months before the Egyptian Revolution, a group of young Egyptians founded the Rassd News Network (RNN) to document the 2010 parliamentary elections. RNN was not like any other news network, however - it was based entirely on Twitter and Facebook, featured volunteer reporters and editors, and posted its news updates with Twitter's 140-character limit. Against all odds, RNN quickly gained a dedicated following, boasting upwards of 800,000 followers on Twitter and hundreds of thousands of members on Facebook. RNN's reporting became the go-to source of information in Egypt about the revolution as it unfolded, upending conventional assumptions about the role of the media, the importance of Twitter, and unsettling our notions about the difference between reportage and activism. Most importantly, RNN’s success heralds the arrival of a new and unique media form – the social media news network. But how did RNN win the trust of its readers? How did it manage to evolve and create a business model to support its small editorial staff? And how did the editors determine which information was trustworthy and build a network of trusted volunteer participants? Drawing on interviews with the organization’s founders and new metrics of social media readership and influence, this paper will offer a history of RNN and situate the news organization inside the growing ecosystem of Egyptian digital activism and media organizations. In doing so, it will offer unexpected answers to the question, "How can social media undermine authoritarianism?" and add to the growing body of knowledge about how digital media can change power structures in authoritarian media environments. It will also trace how RNN has evolved and thrived under the more open media policies of post-Mubarak Egypt. In the paper, I argue that RNN’s model leveraged the affordances of horizontal online networks of trust and friendship, and that by collaborating with established news media organizations like Al-Jazeera, RNN was able to carve out a unique sphere of influence for Egypt’s young, wired revolutionary generation.

In this paper, I look at how three Lebanese satellite stations cover the Syrian civil war in their news broadcasts. It is useful to analyze Lebanon’s news programming because the relative lack of regulation over its media allows them to take drastically different political stances. Syria and Lebanon’s unique political and cultural connection causes the conflict to permeate both the debates over foreign and domestic policy. My paper is significant because it elucidates the specific ways in which the Syrian crisis divides the already fractured Lebanese populace. My analysis reveals how regional news sources interpret the Arab Spring. The stations that I take into consideration are the Lebanese Broadcast Corporation (LBC), al-Manar, and Murr Television (MTV). These three stations represent distinct political factions within Lebanon. Both LBC and MTV have owners that were critical of the Syrian military presence in Lebanon prior to 2005, but MTV’s relationship to the Syrian regime was so antagonistic that it was forced to shut down in 2002 and did not reopen until 2009. Al-Manar, Hezbollah’s main media outlet, is very supportive of Bashar al-Assad’s regime. The contrasting political stances of these news stations find expression in the way the Syrian conflict is portrayed in nightly news broadcasts. Through use of textual and content analysis, I look at seven days of broadcasts from 2012 starting on December 14 and ending on December 21. I record the amount of time spent on each story, the primary sources cited, the stories’ narratives, and the people interviewed. Further, through the use of discursive analysis, I examine the language used to describe the Syrian crisis and the frames used to construct narrative in the stories that refer to Syria. This information enables me to determine the priority given to the Syrian conflict and the particular spin of each station’s coverage. I find that the stations differ in the amount of legitimacy they ascribe to the Syrian opposition or the Assad regime. I also find stark differences in the way the stations portray the international community. Notably, I find that LBC, and MTV to a lesser extent, emphasize the actions that the Lebanese state is taking in response to the conflict and the refugee crisis. In contrast, al-Manar gives relatively little coverage to Lebanese state officials, focusing instead on Syrian officials and Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah.

Although the design of the American news interview has been dissected and analyzed in terms of the internal power politics it upholds between the interviewer and interviewee and along with the effect on its audiences, an analysis has yet to be made regarding similarly staged political interviews in Arabic. This paper engages with and challenges the assumption of generalizing interview style and method to be applicable in every culture. In the case of the news interview program, Bila Houdoud, the interviewer Ahmad Mansour, who represents the people, cedes power to his guest. The interviewee, whether male or female, asserts a form of condescension over Mansour’s passivity. Using gesticulations and verbal utterances, the interviewees display public emotion and become visibly and verbally more impassioned. Such a style destabilizes previous American and British analyses and constructed notions regarding “proper” interview methodology. This study connects the relevance of media powerhouses like Al Jazeera and the methods by which is contends with American news media to Bila Houdoud’s interviews’ challenge to these norms. Furthermore, the interview style employed in Bila Houdoud becomes a parallel to the cultural practice of mujamala in various Arabic-speaking cultures. This custom of niceties creates a posed reality in which the host and guest challenge one another’s power through offerings and subsequent refusals of favors or gifts. In addition to parallels with the cultural practice of mujamala, this paper analyzes three interviews from Bila Houdoud with Mohammad Morsi, Abdelilah Benkirane, and Bassima Hakkaoui from January 2011 to the present. It encapsulates the year after the revolutions and reforms that swept several Arab nations including Egypt and Morocco. It places the interview within the growing visibility and supposed democratization of politics and news media in the Arab world. It also situates the interview within the broader frame of the essentialized “[Pan]-Arab Street” as this show, as a case study, seeks to co-opt this concept in the embodiment of Ahmad Mansour. Bila Houdoud becomes the physical stage upon which politics and identities can be displayed for a large Arabic-speaking audience.

Al-Walada min al-Khasera (Born from the Loins, part one and two) was the sole full-length drama mini-series during the 2011 and 2012 Ramadan season in Syria to refer directly to the uprising against the Baathist regime. From the mentally ill mukhabarat officer who abuses his power, the government’s callous decimation of an impoverished neighborhood, to the unabashed connection of top government officials to organized crime, the mini-series tackles corruption through the lens of masculinity. In this mini-series, the presence of an embattled masculinity serves as a thinly veiled critique of the regime’s injustice. A recurrent theme is how political oppression creates a cyclical tradition of dominance and forced subservience in relationships. Discussions of part one and two of the mini-series have manifested the tension among intellectuals arising from the fact that Syrian cultures of resistance operate within an atmosphere of government co-optation. With the division widening during the uprising, some Syrians alleged that Redwan supports the regime, an accusation leveled against drama creators who critique the regime without facing punishment. Others argue that the government is too distracted and that dissident writers will pay the price later. Others contend that this mini-series is intended to paint a democratic façade to outside viewers. Some argue that this is tanfis (venting). Yet, if tanfis was intended as a means of releasing frustration in order to prevent the population from protesting the regime, then surely it loses its meaning since the 2011 uprising when the wall of fear was broken and resistance is a part of daily life. Because of the Baath regime’s effort to co-opt intellectuals, drama creators have had to walk a fine line to introduce their subversive ideas. Recently it has been argued that while the previous generation was engaged in a struggle to widen the boundaries of accepted discourse, this generation is implicated in “the whisper strategy,” encouraging a comfortable dialogue with power. I argue that while there are some intellectuals the regime manages to “buy,” this kind of generalization not only presents intellectuals as a monolithic group, but also discredits their attempts to engage in innuendo and word artistry to subvert state rhetoric. In this presentation that focuses on the recent screenplays of Samer Redwan, I return agency to the artist, by examining the multi-faceted ways this drama creator uses constructions of masculinity to engage in political critique.

Throughout its modern history, Syria's airwaves have been shaped by a mixture of state-controlled domestic broadcasts, private regional stations (mostly coming from Lebanon), and the public diplomacy/propaganda broadcasts of foreign states (BBC Arabic, VOA/Radio Sawa, or Egypt's Sawt al-'Arab) and non-state organizations (Hezbollah's Idha'at an-N?r, or the PFLP-GC's Idha'at al-Quds from within Syria.) In 2005, the first private radio stations began broadcasting inside Syria, competing with Lebanese commercial stations and adding another layer to the country's domestic radioscape. As Syria has descended into civil war, the political positioning of these stations has been reflected in their musical content. While Syrian state radio attempts to maintain a weakening "state monopoly on culture" (Boëx, Wedeen), private and foreign stations broadcast their political affiliations through musical playlists as well as news content. Even as radio mainstays like Fairuz maintain a ubiquitous presence on the airwaves, both old and new musical signifiers of nation, identity, religion, and resistance are used by local and international broadcasters to shape Syria's political landscape. Outlining a taxonomy of radio music genres, this paper describe the music and musical discourse that comprises the Syrian radioscape, and some of the ways in which this radioscape has shifted during the civil war. This analysis is based on hundreds of hours of Syrian radio recorded in Damascus in 2010, and subsequently from across the border in Lebanon and via internet radio between 2011-2013, as well as print media and personal interviews with broadcasters.