four - Social media and political participation: BBC World Service and the Arabic Spring

Summary

Introduction

European international broadcasters once enjoyed a privileged position in the global media sphere. For decades, the BBC World Service, Radio France International and Deutsche Welle, alongside their American counterpart Voice of America, have been among the most listened-to radio stations in the world. Their broadcasts in Arabic have been an integral part of Middle Eastern news cultures, even if they have also been regarded with an ambivalent mixture of respect and suspicion (Partner, 1988; Vaughan, 2008). These European and American broadcasters now operate in an environment where they must compete with very popular news organisations such as Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya that attract large Arabic-speaking audiences not only in the Middle East but globally. As state-funded international broadcasters, they also have more or less explicit diplomatic functions: from projecting a positive national image on the world stage to directly communicating strategic interests and foreign policy goals to Middle East audiences; from instilling the virtues of informed citizenship to promoting the communication skills required for deliberative democracy. In the context of a highly uncertain and volatile geopolitical situation in the Middle East, funding cuts, shifts in governance, as well as technological and editorial challenges, these ‘legacy’ broadcasters are struggling to compete in former territories where they once thrived, and their missions are no longer clear or certain.

The foreign-language services of international broadcasters, like BBC Arabic, must find new ways to engage Arabic-speaking audiences who now have a plethora of media from which to choose, and who may baulk at the thought of consuming the news from old colonial powers. They are experimenting with using social media to attract and keep their audiences and, in order to fulfil their public service remit, to promote participation among citizens in political debate. BBC Arabic already has a long history of offering audiences opportunities to contribute to programmes via the telephone and e-mail but, with the advent of social media, the terms of engagement change (Gillespie, 2013). Producers employ real-time social media-monitoring tools to track user behaviour, make editorial choices, evaluate their work and satisfy funders, stakeholders and governments. The social media data gives producers useful insights into which topics are trending on Twitter or how Facebook groups debate political issues and events, but it also creates problems.