Reporting the Middle East: The Practice of News in the Twenty-First Century

How do the media cover the Middle East? Through a country-by-country approach, this book provides detailed analysis of the complexities of reporting from the Arab World. Each chapter provides an overview of a country, including the political context, relationships to international politics and the key elements relating to the place as covered in Western media. The authors explore how the media can be used to serve particular political agendas on both a regional and international level. They also consider the changes to the media landscape following the growth of digital and social media, showing how access to the media is no longer restricted to state or elite actors. By studying coverage of the Middle East from a whole range of news providers, this book shows how news formats and practices may be defined and shaped differently by different nations. It will be essential reading for scholars and practitioners of journalism, especially those focusing on the Arab World.

Zahera Harb is Senior Lecturer in Journalism at City University, London and previously worked as a journalist in Lebanon. She is the author of Channels of Resistance: Liberation Propaganda, Hezbollah and the Media and co-editor (with Dina Matar) of Narrating Conflict in the Middle East: Discourse, Image and Communications Practices in Lebanon, both published by I.B.Tauris.