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.