Book Review: Hafez, Kai (editor) Arab Media – Power and Weakness, 2008, New York: Continuum International, ISBN 978-0826428363 (original) (raw)

Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture

Arab Media-Power and Weakness provides an assessment of the emergent field of Arab media studies. The 13 articles of the volume, most written by veterans in the field, discuss issues related to the effects, audiences, contexts, ethics, economy, law and culture of Arab media. The book's introduction by editor Kai Hafez ties this plethora of material together in an ambitious attempt to outline current research on the links between Arab politics, society and media, and to point to some of the conclusions and problems we can extract from the literature. Hafez is interested in how the political economy structures the content of media, in the production process itself, as well as in the effects media have on politics and society. The aim of assessing Arab media research some 15 years after the launch of al-Jazeera and eight years after 9/11, the two principal events that spawned broad scholarly interest in Arab media, runs through the book's chapters, several of which (by Muhammad Ayish, Tarik Sabry and Hussein Amin) are dedicated to an overview and analysis of the field. The editor must be commended for thus giving the book a coherence, which means that, to some extent, it reads as one long discussion of related debates. A recurrent theme in the book is the lack of empirically informed studies, on the one hand, and of theoretical sophistication on the other. This is evidence that Arab media studies does indeed suffer from teething problems, as Hafez puts it in his introduction. Media are complex social phenomena with wide-ranging manifestations and ramifications. Where to look? Which particular problems to focus on? And, most acutely, which disciplinary tools and literature to apply? The most obvious question, to most people, has been whether or not new media contribute to democratization and political liberalization. The simple answer seems to be no, or at least not very much. New media like satellite TV and internet