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Every Libyan news outlet has obvious and sometimes unabashed biases – Libya24 for example, has given itself a reputation for taking a pro-Gaddafi stance, while others such as al-Nabaa are seen as overly sympathetic to the Muslim Brotherhood. The extent to which they allow debate and independent comment varies. As dozens of civilians have been killed since the start of Haftar’s offensive on Tripoli last week, a staunchly pro-Haftar news outlet, Libya Alhadath, broadcasts a steady stream of songs glorifying Haftar and his offensive, in a way reminiscent of Libya’s solitary state TV channel for most of the Gaddafi era.

most Libyan news outlets and TV channels have dramatically changed their stances over the past number of years as alliances have changed and new actors have emerged in the country

Libyans don’t trust local media.

Saudi Arabia’s history with WWE, like much of its frenetic investment in sports and entertainment over the past few years, is a study in how little diplomacy is needed when you control one of the largest sovereign wealth funds in history. Using their Public Investment Fund, valued at more than $776 billion, the Saudis have effectively bought some of the world’s most loyal fan bases, bent opponents to their will and wildly shifted the economics of international sports.

In the sports world, overcoming a reputation as a global pariah — condemned by human rights organizations for alleged war atrocities and its links to the 9/11 hijackers, the imprisonment of activists and the Khashoggi assassination — has been as simple for Saudi Arabia as advancing claims of innocence or autonomy.

The Saudi Pro League has become the default destination for aging soccer legends seeking unprecedented paydays, including Cristiano Ronaldo, who reportedly is paid roughly $220 million per year to play for Al Nassr. Lionel Messi turned down a similar bounty in favor of playing in the United States. But he still agreed to promote Saudi Arabia for a reported $25 million under a contract that mandates he is not permitted to make any remarks that “tarnish” the kingdom.

A prolific writer, Heikal penned dozens of books, chronicling events as a witness to history, his legacy linked with his association with Nasser. He was not just a journalist, newspaper editor, and later historian. Heikal was Nasser’s emissary with Western diplomats, a champion of Nasser’s brand of socialism and pan-Arab nationalism. He composed his speeches and ghost wrote Nasser’s political manifesto, The Philosophy of the Revolution. As the president’s alter ego, Heikal’s writings were read for clues to Nasser’s thinking. His influence derived from his proximity to power.

Heikal blurred the line between the role of a journalist and that of a politician. “He introduced a model in Egypt and the Arab world about what your ambitions should be as a journalist. In the West or Europe, you gain your reputation from your independence as a journalist,” explained Dawoud. “When I am the president’s consultant and I attend his close meetings and I write his speeches, there is definitely a lot of information that I would have to keep secret. That goes contrary to my job as a journalist, which is to find as much information as I can.”

The state media wholeheartedly embraced socialism and pan-Arabism, becoming a filter of information and propaganda, instead of the promised transformation of the institution into one that supposedly guides the public and builds society. Critical voices were muted, the military junta was sacrosanct, and Nasser was fortified as a national hero. The failings of the regime were not attributed to the president, but to the reactionary and destructive forces of capitalism and feudalism. Nasser’s personal confidant Muhammad Hassanein Heikal was appointed chairman of the board of al-Ahram, then later of Dar al-Hilal and Akhbar al-Youm publishing houses.

Tim Sebastian, journalist and head of the New Arab Debates, announced during a press conference today that the Ministry of the Interior has assured him that they did not direct police officers to gather information about the attendees of the May 29 debate. During the debate, which took place at the Institute of Cultural Heritage in Tunis’s old city, two policemen allegedly asked a Tunisian staff member of the New Arab Debates team for the list of attendees at the event, claiming that they were acting on “orders from superiors.” The New Arab Debates team announced the suspension of their activities in Tunis as a sign of protest against the incident.

“We thought we just acquired freedom of speech. If they’re trying to intimidate us with such acts, we shouldn’t remain silent,”

“What matters the most for us is the reputation of Tunisia. Excuses such as ‘orders from superiors’ are tools of the old regime,”

It’s not that we need social-media journalists, but beat journalists who know how to incorporate social-media as a key resource. Journalism schools need to classes which teach these skills, and news organizations have train people on them. Some of these skills echo those of traditional journalism, while others are novel ones. (How to detect sockpuppets (developing a “sockdar”), how to triungulate citizen reports, how to find conversations about a particular topic, etc., for example.)

Many tools are needed and someone needs to create them. I was happy to recently hear that Columbia school of journalism has five students majoring in journalism and computer science. May this model spread, and may developing new platforms for journalism also be seen properly as journalism–as it requires a proper understanding of the craft and process of journalism, not just how to code, to create these tools.

the importance of beat –I trusted Rasha’s reporting, for example, because she is a a fellow professor, social scientist and a colleague and I know her to be careful with facts. For me, it wasn’t about “oh, here’s a tweet” but more about “oh, here’s a person with a solid reputation.” This is no different than what traditional journalism does.

The president of the association of Egyptian judges said Thursday that they were abandoning their neutrality toward the coming presidential runoff in an effort to guard against an Islamist monopoly of power.

if the group’s members had known Islamists would win most of the seats in Parliament after elections that ended in January, they would not have supervised the voting

the effect of Judge Zend’s appearance was a public pitch for the presidential campaign of Ahmed Shafik, the last prime minister under Mr. Mubarak, who is now squaring off against the Brotherhood’s nominee, Mohamed Morsi

We all grew up with the standard formula: journalism plays a crucial role in making western democracies work by providing citizens with the information that enables them to make informed judgments about urgent issues of general interest. Therefore, the fundamental question for those who study the western new media is: Do they in fact do what they are supposed, and claim, to do?

The crucial western capitalist context in which the news media operate in Dutch society and which they fundamentally reflect, is the same as that of British and American societies. Economic and foreign policies in the three countries are much more alike than different. The Netherlands too avowedly promotes ‘free trade’ and ‘the spread of democracy’ to less fortunate countries. In the Netherlands too, neoliberal thinking dominates politics. Journalism in the three countries is also very much alike. The ruling professional ideology is ‘objectivity.’ The media are mostly privately-owned and depend on advertising revenue. In the name of ‘freedom of the press’, the government exercises restraint, taking the position that, as much as possible, the market should decide which publications live and die. But journalists and politicians are caught in a symbiotic relationship and the PR industry exerts a lot of covert influence on journalism. It was American journalist Ben Bagdikian, who claimed in his popular The Media Monopoly , now in its sixth edition, that continuing concentration in the American media industry amounts to a de facto news monopoly. As a result, American news reflects the interests of political and economic elites. Just like in the Netherlands, where media markets are dominated by a few big corporations.

The official version of Dutch media history maintains that the partisan journalism which was prevalent until the 1970s fell far short, because it was intimately tied to political parties. In the 1970s, journalism professionalized and since then it has done more or less what it is supposed to do. But this is a very partial account. Indeed, the partisan media hardly practiced journalism as we like to see it done: acting as the watchdog of democracy. But when journalism shrugged off its political ties, the market filled the vacuum, and far from the market functioning as an ‘engine of freedom,’ to use British scholar James Curran’s words - the market in reality amounted to yet another ‘system of control,’ to cite Curran once again. The commercial media’s primary task is not to provide the population with relevant, independently-gathered information. Their primary task is to deliver readers, viewers and listeners to advertisers. As a consequence, the media in the Netherlands are owned by rich corporations and persons who have a stake in maintaining friendly ties with other corporations and also the government, for access to powerful political sources needs to be kept at all costs. No wonder that the journalistic product reflects the interests of elites. The media are the elite, also in the Netherlands, its reputation of a progressive country regarding ‘cultural’ issues like abortion and the death penalty notwithstanding. Dutch journalism thus remains far from independent, at least, if we take Jurgen Habermas’ definition seriously, whereby a public sphere ‘can only approach autonomy if it is independent from both the state and commercial interests’. 

In the absence of protest workshops and ‘how-to’ manuals, video footage captured on mobile phones in Kiev (and elsewhere) and uploaded to social media sites now serves as a repository for protest tactics, to be studied and adapted by anti-coup protesters thousands of miles away in Cairo. These instances of unsentimental appropriation mark an interesting departure from previous patterns of resource sharing and border-crossing diffusion of protest tactics, patterns which saw Egyptian activists cultivate a series of formative linkages with pro-democracy movements such as Serbia’s Otpor movement in the years before the Jan. 25 revolution.

We have teams of people who go on YouTube and search for videos of other protests around the world and when they come across a new tactic, they post it on the Facebook page. If we find a good tutorial video, we translate it into Arabic

The co-ordination of protests themselves, however, is increasingly occurring offline: Egyptian state security has grown so adept at infiltrating online groups, that mosques and university campuses are now the two most important associational spaces in which to organize. In many neighborhoods, certain mosques have a reputation for playing host to rallies that are launched after prayer. Here, would-be protesters do not need access to formal protest networks to participate; they simply need to turn up. These are often the same mosques from where protests were launched during the Jan. 25 revolution. If the protests begin elsewhere, the relevant times and locations are distributed to a trusted list of regular protest-goers who then relay the information to friends and relatives

occupation also corrupts the Israelis

Ms. Abergil, whose compulsory service ended last year, refused to accept any responsibility for harming Israel’s international reputation, saying: We will always be attacked. Whatever we do, we will always be attacked.

Next year, the gritty tale about mafia-style murders will become the first Arabic language film to represent Israel at the Oscars.

Impoverished Israeli Arabs shooting one another in the shadow of the gleaming towers of Tel Aviv is far from Israel's preferred international image.

dark underside to the ideal of coexistence sometimes touted in mixed Jewish-Arab areas like Jaffa.

The BDDK watchdog was quoted as saying that it had received complaints that the report hurt the reputation of Turkish banks and caused volatility in financial markets. A judicial process will be carried out regarding JP Morgan, Anadolu said.

Attalah is the chief editor of Egypt’s only independent media outlet, with 124,000 followers on Twitter and 241,000 on Facebook. But Mada Masr isn’t alone. It’s among a growing number of independent Arabic digital outlets that are emerging as fresh sources of news in a region where tyrants and oligarchs have for decades controlled the media.

Some, like Al Jumhuriya (The Republic) and Syria Untold, are run by exiled Syrian intellectuals from Germany, Turkey and Lebanon. Others, like Daraj (Stairs) — with 135,000 followers on Facebook — are providing pan-Arab coverage from Lebanon, where most traditional newspapers are party-affiliated. Still others, like 7iber (pronounced “hiber,” and meaning Ink) and Sowt (Voice), are offering nuanced coverage to readers in Jordan despite the threat of censorship. 7iber has 120,000 followers on Twitter and 341,000 on Facebook.

grief, limited resources and threat of censorship haven’t dissuaded these outlets from revolutionizing Arabic-language journalism

they had shared and could recite the viral Facebook memes constructing an alternate reality of nefarious Muslim plots. Mr. Lal called them “the embers beneath the ashes” of Sinhalese anger

the forces of social disruption that have followed Facebook’s rapid expansion in the developing world, whose markets represent the company’s financial future. For months, we had been tracking riots and lynchings around the world linked to misinformation and hate speech on Facebook, which pushes whatever content keeps users on the site longest — a potentially damaging practice in countries with weak institutions.

Time and again, communal hatreds overrun the newsfeed — the primary portal for news and information for many users — unchecked as local media are displaced by Facebook and governments find themselves with little leverage over the company. Some users, energized by hate speech and misinformation, plot real-world attacks.

Liao Liang's mission in the Kenyan capital is hardly confidential: As a senior editor of the China Global Television Network (CGTN), a subsidiary of Chinese state television, his task is that of shining a positive light on his country's ambitious activities -- particularly those in Africa, where China's reputation has suffered as its footprint has grown.

"It's an apartheid system," he says, with the Chinese at the top, then the whites, then the blacks and at the very bottom are the Kenyans. "We have to let the Chinese go first in the restrooms and we're only allowed to eat in the cafeteria after 1 p.m., after they have eaten. They treat us like their inferiors." Sometimes, James M. says, he only receives half of his contractual editor's salary of 2,000 euros per month. He says he is penalized 2,000 shillings - around 17 euros - for every mistake in his stories, including typos.

CGTN journalists aren't just there to ward off criticism of China's expansion in Africa but also to break the West's media dominance. The broadcaster has a similar mission in Africa as Russia's state broadcaster RT does in Europe.

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) is worried about the way Egyptian media outlets are being taken over by businessmen linked to the government and intelligence services. The regime’s domination of the media continues to grow and is even affecting pro-government media.

Al Hayat was quietly taken over at the end of August. The new owner’s identity has not yet been officially announced but several Egyptian media outlets have reported that it was acquired by Falcon, a successful Egyptian security company whose CEO is a former senior military intelligence officer and a former head of the radio and TV regulatory agency.

the financial pressure came shortly after Al Wafd’s representatives in parliament expressed their opposition to the government’s controversial plan to hand over two strategic islands, Tiran and Sanafir, to Saudi Arabia

Badani is part of a network of at least 19 fake personas that has spent the past year placing more than 90 opinion pieces in 46 different publications. The articles heaped praise on the United Arab Emirates and advocated for a tougher approach to Qatar, Turkey, Iran and its proxy groups in Iraq and Lebanon. 

“This vast influence operation highlights the ease with which malicious actors can exploit the identity of real people, dupe international news outlets, and have propaganda of unknown provenance legitimized through reputable media,” Marc Owen Jones, an assistant professor at Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Qatar who first noticed suspicious posts by members of the network, told The Daily Beast. “It’s not just fake news we need to be wary of, but fake journalists.”

placed articles critical of Qatar and supportive of tougher sanctions on Iran in conservative North American outlets like Human Events and conservative writer Andy Ngo’s The Post Millennial, as well as Israeli and Middle Eastern newspapers like The Jerusalem Post and Al Arabiya, and Asian newspapers like the South China Morning Post.