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Structure
Introduction Part I and II
To understand how the media along the southern rim of the Mediterranean has undergone change in the years since the Arab Uprisings of 2011, we began by looking at its historical evolution within the larger political system. This meant focusing on the institutions, laws, regulations and practices that composed each specific media environment, environment – the structures that delineate the media as a social institution within the state. Only by uncovering the ways the media, as a modern institution, had developed as the states under investigation themselves had modernised, could the framework in which the media sat and operated be comprehended. Yet structures, despite being codified in rules, legislation and regulatory guidelines, are nonetheless fluid and malleable. They are also political. In Morocco, Tunisia and Turkey, the structures governing the media have been in constant transition. In the former two, an uptick in change took place after the Arab Uprisings in 2011; in Turkey, a watershed moment was reached with the Gezi Park demonstrations, and another with the attempted coup of 2016. These events prompted a response to civil demands that led to constitutional changes in Morocco and Tunisia that directly affected the media, and in Turkey to judicial and jurisdictional changes in the red lines determining what was and was not acceptable in media practice. Though shifts in each country reflect particularities specific to the political and cultural experience of that state, what is of equal interest is to explore in what ways the changes led to similar outcomes – how did the different societies across a large territory respond in ways that might be understood as regionally specific, or as socio-culturally representative, or as historically linked? In processes in which discursive power and political change underwent shifts, what could an understanding of structure illustrate in regard to generalisable change?
By structure, we mean the legal, regulatory and institutional frameworks defining the formats, licensing and distribution of media products (newspapers, broadcasters, websites) and the responsibilities, duties and privileges of their producers (corporate or governmental). Structure likewise is fundamental in determining content, through laws on censorship and blasphemy, practices of the judicial system and formal and informal red lines restricting freedom of speech. Indeed, structures are not purely skeletons, but reflect the socio-political spirit by which the laws and regulations are devised, interpreted and carried out. In ‘Government-media relations in Tunisia: A paradigm shift in the culture of governance?’, George Joffé quotes Alexis de Tocqueville’s observation:
I am thoroughly convinced that political societies are not what their laws make them but what they are prepared in advance to be by the feelings, the beliefs, the ideas, the habits of heart and mind of the men who compose them.
The evolution of the media in Tunisia, Turkey and Morocco shares both similarities and differences. In all three, for example, television, which arrived in the 1940s, was initially used as an instrument of state to promote the government. Thus, in all three, the public relations capacity of television was officially understood and reserved as a government monopoly. It was only once pirate radio and later television programmes began to beam in across their borders via satellite that privatisation became an issue and eventually broke open their audio-visual markets. Yet the timing for all three was not the same, and the rule-making that accompanied the process drew from different cultural sources – Tunisia and Morocco based their media and broadcast structures on that of their colonial nemesis, France, which did not always fit their needs terribly well, but did result in a level of structural coherency. Turkey’s approach was more ad hoc and reactive, being often devised to contain developments that had already occurred. Today, Turkey continues to grapple with inconsistencies in its media structure, such as established television broadcasters operating without an official licence, because legal licensing has never reflected actual market demand.
Yet, it is the similarities among the media landscapes that prove most fascinating, despite the enormous differences in the three states’ sizes and location, government type and historical experience, suggesting a degree of generalisability across the region. For the first time this research enabled us to draw detailed comparisons, because the research in all three states was based on the same design components, asked similar questions, interviewed officials and sector actors serving in similar capacities and was conducted within a single timeframe (all field work took place between 2014 and 2016).
In Part I: Structural Status of Media in Governance and Law, the media structures of Tunisia, Turkey and Morocco, as analysed in the first three articles that comprise Part I, can be understood to reflect three important and shared thematic threads:
The symbolic and communicative power of media is well understood. All three states investigated, although differing substantially in government form, view media as symbolically potent. As such, all exhibited tendencies to control the media from the political centre, irrespective of whether the government was defined by Islamic, republican or monarchical paradigms. The media’s struggle for resources could be seen as significantly impacted by its proximity to ruling elites. Indeed, any given media’s power in all three societies is in part reflective of its own ideological or financial capacity to engage in those very networks of influence that determine the laws and regulations of the sector. How effectively the media embodies the values of the elite at the centre of power directly impacts, then, the status of the media itself in all three states; if the media fails in this process, the likelihood of survival is thin, given the sensitivity of the centre to deviation.
Media is officially viewed as a possible threat. The relationship of media to government is influenced in all three states by the security apparatus; political leaders and audiences both view a careless media as capable of harming the national interest. The result in all three states is close monitoring of the media’s activities, heavy penal punishments for infringements and court systems that are loathe to counteract what the government considers appropriate and not. Joffé describes the relationship between government and media as fraught, the former uncomfortable with the media’s promulgation of opposition views, which are interpreted ‘as a threat to political hegemony’. Perceiving media as a challenge to official political culture is easily translated into the more dangerous context of posing a risk to the security of the state. Describing the situation after the revolution, Joffé goes on to observe, ‘In Tunisia this autocratic political culture had, since independence in 1956, been more deeply entrenched within the discourse of governance than was generally recognised’, leading successive transitional prime ministers, despite the national (and notional) progression toward democracy, to ‘treat the media as an instrument of government in accordance with their own imperatives’.
Structures (statutory, legal, etc.) embody the ambivalence between government and media. The role of the media and its use of free expression is highly contested by government and audiences alike. The media embodies a tension between ambiguities in practices surrounding religious and political norms in the popular imaginary, with implications for what is publicly acceptable and dignified and what is not. From a structural perspective, the outcome is a predominance of narrow regulatory frameworks that constrain the media’s range of operation through both written and unwritten red lines. Regulatory and legal systems tend to adopt a dual approach: first, a normatively conservative response to media action (via court trials or fines, for example), and second, a supportive stance to liberal-corporatist media control (via privatisation and non-transparent government linkages).
In Part II: Structures of Media and Surveillance, the three chapters focus on online and social media and their relation to government practices of surveillance. Here we see two common thematic threads, despite the significant changes that occurred in Tunisia after the departure of President Ben Ali.
Government control of ISPs. In all three states, the online and social media terrains are unsettled, a locus of experimentation for governments and publics alike as new tools of expression as well as control – and their often unexpected usage implications – continue to emerge. A lack of transparency in government surveillance structures and their association with internet service providers (ISPs, both public and private) is endemic. As noted by Alexis Artaud de la Ferrière and Narseo Vallina-Rodrigues in their chapter, ‘The scissors and the magnifying glass: Internet governance in the transitional Tunisian context’,
The law in itself did not determine censorship under Ben Ali, nor does it today. Its main thrust is to create a legal framework for co-opting ISPs as active (and subservient) partners to the state in policing online traffic by making them responsible for content and making their technical capacities available to the state.
Online surveillance is fragmented, not centrally controlled. Laws restricting online media have become more constraining, as has the use of existing penal codes to reduce social media reach and online activism. Audience size for online media is critical – smaller sites can be considerably more outspoken than larger ones when discussing such issues as the military, terrorism or the actions of government officials. Surveillance and constraint are fragmented and lack uniformity, reflecting both the unwieldy nature of the technology and the public dispersion of expertise. As Erkan Saka observes in his chapter ‘Social Media as a Space for Political Battles: AK Trolls and other politically motivated trolling’, blocking in Turkey against internal websites as well as international services such as YouTube is ‘not centrally controlled, NSA-style’; ISPs will implement government directives according to their individual practices, while trolls of various political stripes will often operate independently, a pattern seen elsewhere. As the case studies in this section show, negotiation between government discourses and independent online voices constitutes an intense struggle on both sides not only over the values understood to embody the society and the state, but over the rights and status of the platforms and internet operators engaged in the process.
Across the region, structures defining and determining the nature of the media and its content populate the landscape in which media is produced and controlled, serving to highlight what media represents to those making and interpreting the rules. The structures already developed, and the subsequent shifts we observed in each country reflected particularities specific to the political, historical and cultural experiences of that state. Notwithstanding the uniqueness of each, unpacking the consequences on the media of rolling civil unrest across the region, including later manifestations in Turkey, offered an opportunity to see continuities across these borders writ large. Bouziane Zaid’s assessment of the state of play in Morocco, in ‘The Authoritarian Trap in State/Media Structures in Morocco’s Political Transition’, could apply across the region:
A key concern questions the extent to which the media reforms represent a break with the past and are aligned with the stated democratization ambitions of the state, or alternatively, represent an illustration of the cyclical fluctuation that has characterized the government-media relationship and freedoms of expression and information in general for the past two decades, and which reflects a deeper ambivalence at the core of Moroccan governance of the media.
This ‘ambivalence’ is a common denominator throughout the southern Mediterranean – where freedom of expression is codified in every constitution as an ideal and cornerstone of human rights, and yet hemmed in by statutory constraints on blasphemy, libel, endangerment to national security, criticism of the monarch or president and promotion of terrorism, among other specified offences. Even though Tunisians themselves described a free media as one of the most important achievements of their revolution and expressed the importance of the Fourth Estate to the new social organisation in their country, many responded to the practical reality of media independence with uncertainty. On the one hand, the public strongly supported the articles protecting freedom of expr...
