Trashing Transitions

Abstract

Marc Lynch examines the paradoxes of Arab media—in which he includes TV channels, radios and newspapers, both national and transnational, as well as websites and social media outlets, all of which form a single ‘media ecosystem’—which both proved crucial to the uprisings and contributed to the failure of democratic transitions. While discussing the significant differences that exist among Arab countries, he shows that the media’s susceptibility to political capture (by regional actors or domestic forces) and its tendency to magnify fear and uncertainty helped fuel the political polarization that would eventually tear the democratic transitions apart.