The Impact of Independent Media on Political Mobilization during the Arab Spring

We investigate how independent media networks influenced political mobilization during the Arab Spring in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. We examine two prominent media networks in the Arab world, Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya, and use data from Arab Barometer surveys to track political mobilization indicators and media networks for Jordan, Lebanon, and Palestine. To account for potential endogeneity, we use the frequency of lightning strikes and submarine cable seaquake shocks as instrumental variables, highlighting the non-random use of independent media. The results indicate that independent media has a positive and significant impact on political mobilization. Specifically, a one-standard-deviation increase in access to independent media corresponds to an approximately 4 percentage point increase in the probability of participating in protests. At the mean of protests, this translates into a rise of about 28%. We discuss how Internet access and the informational aspect of the media seem to explain the results. Our supplementary analyses suggest that these estimates mainly capture the effects of Internet access rather than television. Furthermore, our findings suggest that the driving force behind mobilization is mainly rooted in the informational aspect of the media rather than the ideological content of the news