Firstly, because the riots were one of the most unexpected events of the last decade. He implications and consequences of the Arab Spring did not go unnoticed by the media around the world. The results only partially confirmed the hypothesis of a renewed importance of national media and showed that in the three countries people tended to attribute very different values to the same news sources.

We looked at how in the three countries the choice of Muslim, Arab or national identity definition was associated with the preference for distinct sources of political news. Our study is based on the Arab Transformations survey (2014), which unlike previous surveys included questions covering both media consumption and identity definition. While prior to 2011 literature mostly highlighted the role of pan-Arab news channels in consolidating a transnational Arab public sphere, recent studies argued that there has been a reinforcement of national media and identities in the Middle East and North Africa, as a consequence of a partial liberalisation of national broadcasting. The article explores the relation between identity definition and trust in different information sources in Morocco, Jordan and Tunisia following the 2011 Uprisings. To do so, it analyses a selection of the comments left by the readers from 28 January to 11 February 2011, showing how during the revolts the channel became a reference point for a large international audience.

The article also intends to explore the profile of the international public interacting with the channel?s website during the Egyptian Revolution. These issues are illustrated through the analysis of a selection of videos and posts published online by Al Jazeera English from 4 January to 11 February 2011.Įven though other media brands previously experimented with user-generated contents, the article argues that Al Jazeera English promoted a new configuration of ?big? and ?small? media in the MENA (Middle East and North African countries) region, based on the already well-established local media convergence. This article aims to focus on the convergence between the two media fields, specifically looking at how social networks? contents have been selected and amplified by Al Jazeera English during the Tunisian and Egyptian 2011 revolutions. Although satellite channels still have a central importance for the circulation of news in the Middle East and North Africa, the attention of many scholars has recently shifted towards the development of social media and their political use in the region.

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