The study “Empirical support for the Al-Jazeera Effect notion: Al-Jazeera’s Twitter following” by Tal Samuel-Azran and Ilan Manor from Reichman University, Israel empirically studied the Al-Jazeera Effect, the notion that Al-Jazeera has promoted fairer horizontal news flow by the inclusion of non-Western perspective. It did so by analyzing its Twitter following.
The Al-Jazeera effect actually consists of two separate parts in scholarship on the issue. First, the network is thought to have a democratizing effect on the Middle East (Abdelmoula 2015). Second, it has an effect on the global media markets by challenging the hegemony of Western news providers like BBC and CNN. The authors focused on the latter part of the effect.
Four epistemic communities: ambassadors who use Twitter, Foreign Ministries, The United Nations (UN) in New York and Geneva and journalists across the world were focused on. The research questions were as following:
RQ1: Does AJE Twitter following amongst ambassadors, foreign ministries, UN missions and journalists support the Al-Jazeera Effect hypothesis?
and
RQ2: Does AJ + Twitter following amongst ambassadors, foreign ministries, UN missions and journalists support the Al-Jazeera Effect hypothesis?
AJE refers to Al-Jazeera English and AJ+ is Al-Jazeera’s online news channel available through the website, Youtube, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
The authors acknowledge that following a social network on Twitter is not the same as consuming it as a news source. They also acknowledge that following on Twitter requires less commitment than searching for news from the source. They do claim that following Al-Jazeera on twitter can be revealing about its centrality as global news source among the epistemic communities.
The News organizations sample consisted of 529 news outlets, including global news outlets, newspapers, diplomatic correspondents, editors-in-chief and radio and television stations. It was compiled from open-source databases listing the most influential news suppliers globally.
The MFA sample consisted of 105 MFA’s (ministries of foreign affairs), listed in Twiplomacy Twitter list. The UN in New York and Geneva, respectively, consisted of 145 and 127 Twitter accounts. Finally, the ambassadors sample consisted of 945 ambassadors, with at least one from 128 countries.
The top five news organizations that attracted followers on Twitter among other news organizations were, in order, Reuters, BBC World, CNN, Al-Jazeera English, and Bloomberg. Notably, AJE outperformed many national news organizations such as RT, France 24, and DW, along with many international news organizations.
Among MFAs, AJE was in sixth place, this time overtaken by Russia Today. AJ+ ranked last among MFAs, and third to last among news. A closer analysis revealed that AJE attracted followers among major World powers and across different World regions.
UN missions were inclined to more likely follow news organizations than MFAs, and AJE ranked fifth among them in New York and fourth in Geneva. Among ambassadors, it was likewise fourth, following BBC World, Reuters, and CNN.
The authors caution that the study did not measure the extent of influence AJE has on diplomat’s worldviews and beliefs, but notes that the high ranking among people and organizations that have to gather information broadly was significant.
In summary, the findings to the first research question support the Al-Jazeera effect hypothesis. The study is among the few that studied the audiences AJE attracts and thus provides an unique contribution. For AJ+, it had a substantially smaller following than many other news organizations. It is possible that its newness and the fact that it is not a news station in itself has caused this.
The authors acknowledge that the study could have benefitted from complimentary qualitative methods like interviews. Nevertheless, the study is an important empirical contribution to the research on Al-Jazeera Effect.
The article “Empirical support for the Al-Jazeera Effect notion: Al-Jazeera’s Twitter following” by Tal Samuel-Azran and Ilan Manor is in International Communication Gazette. (free abstract).
Picture: Al Jazeera logo, Wikipedia.