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voice either in public or in private in the age of satellite television than they were before. Dina matar s chapter on palestinians in thediaspora shows how members of this community feel different from other arabs. Participants in her research include some who turn tonews for confirmation of their identity, but others who harbour strong suspicions about possible covert political and economic agendasof arab television channels. Matar discovers that, where media create polarised contexts of us and them her respondents tend towardsdefensive and essentialising reactions. Importantly, however, they turn to a wide range of sources for news. This choice of viewing offersalternatives to polarised media contexts, with the result that members of the diasporic audience seems to more continuously betweenessentialising and more open positions. Matar states that that movement challenges assumptions about the emergence of particularisticidentities that are increasingly common in popular media and political discourse. The rarity of studies like those of matar and karam ishighlighted in tarik sabry s chapter, which peers into the void where a nascent project of arab cultural studies should be. Sabry probesa possible set of explanations for why it is that arab scholars currently take cultural imperialism simply as a given, discerning no needfor empirical enquiry into the ways in which imperialism and its aftermath have affected the contemporary ordinary and everyday hefinds that intellectuals tend to conflate past and present, leading to disdain for the culture of the tellingly named arab street andblindness to the need for a coherent field of cultural studies that engages with lived experience today. In the absence of a legitimatedspace for the study of contemporary culture, sabry warts that current modes of thinking risk masking the very dynamics ofimperialism that an effective anti imperialist project would want to understand. Media, policy-making and vested interests ideas aboutmedia influence are sometimes framed in terms of the so-called cnn effect in this approach, the spotlight switches away from mediainfluence on the general public, towards policy-makers and their responsiveness to media accounts of situations and events, such asthose provided by the atlanta-based satellite channel cnn during and after the gulf war. Precisely speaking, the core of the debatearound the cnn effect relates to whether the media are able to influence governments to pursue military intervention duringhumanitarian crises thereby overriding long-standing principles of non-intervention and state sovereignty. More loosely, theimplication is that, whatever their influence on public opinion, the media can bring pressure to bear on those in power to change theirpolicies. The authors who coined the term al-jazeera effect did not use it to probe the precise dynamics of media and high-level policy-making in the middle east. Nevertheless, the potential for representations via the arab media to influence the decisions of arab politicalleaders is in an important issue to be addressed. If it could be shown that the existence of media narratives and images of war, conflict,angry crowds, or even just some forms of media discourse, had an identifiable impact on policy in their ownright, then some of thegrander claims made for new arab media might carry weight. Dale eickelman, for example, has written that new communicationsmedia are turning the arab street into a public sphere in which greater numbers of people, and not just a political and economic elite,will have a say in governance and public issues the point about an observation such as this lies in the fact that its author refers to a sayin governance not a say about governance the distinctions is important, because most evidence suggests that the alliances and prioritiesof arab ruling elites influence the shape and orientation of the arab media, so that editorial content is ultimately attributable not topeople outside the elite but to political agendas that reflect patterns of elite ownership and control. Thus the argument can be madethat it is change caused by divisions and realignments among ruling elites that surfaces via the arab media landscape, rather thanmedia content that triggers political change. The question of how far media practitioners work knowingly or not to the agenda ofgovernments and politicians, rather than in the service of the electorate, is a perennial subject of investigation in the general field ofpolitical communication. Studies over many years pointed to the importance of elites as dominant media sources in western contexts,and thus as primary definers of new agendas, which is why the notion of the cnn effect and its suggestion of a shift in this balance wasso significant. For example, daniel hallin s research on the allegedly oppositional media coverage of the vietnam war had seemed toshow that this coverage essentially reflected little more than widening differences over the war among the political elite. Hallinconcluded that the media, as institutions, reflect the prevailing pattern of political debate: when consensus is strong, they tend to staywithin the limits of the political discussion it defines; when it begins to break down, coverage becomes increasingly critical and diverseand increasingly difficult for officials to control. As piers robinson has pointed out, evidence exists to shed more light on aspects of thisinterpretation and capture more precisely the process whereby media criticism of government, instead of being brushed aside orresisted, may actually become instrumental in bringing about policy shifts. At the time of the Vietnam war, certain political actors whowere looking to justify a change of us policy were able find that justification in visual evidence supplied by journalists. Picking up onthe twin ideas implicit in this scenario namely elite dissensus and policy uncertainty within the executive branch of governmentrobinson suggests that media criticism of government is only rarely influential in policy-making in western contexts because acombination of elite dissensus and acute policy uncertainty within government is also rare. In the theoretical model he proposes, it isonly in such a situation that the media may start to operate outside what hallin called the sphere of legitimate controversy therebybecoming active participants influencing elite debate. That is partly because political actors seeking a change in policy can use criticalmedia coverage, which may reflect non-elite concerns, to gain bargaining power vis--vis other members of the elite. It is important toremember that robinson s own research focuses specially on the role played by news reporting of humanitarian crises. Nevertheless,the extent of elite dissensus and policy uncertainty at the heart of certain arab governments, which are under intense internal andexternal pressure to adopt new policies, suggests striking parallels with aspects of a theoretical model in which highly placed, butcompeting, political forces deploy critical media content to create additional pressure for pressure for policy change. Saudi arabia s ruling familyhas many branches, whose leading figures occupy key government positions but also hold different visions for their country s future. Inthe absence of channels for legitimising their policy p s through the ballot box, they have invested in media operations at home andabroad in order to ensure favorable publicity for these p s at both the national and regional levels. Press reports that saudi arabia sking abdullah is accustomed to have small television screens and one large flat-screen television in his office, and another television inhis car, suggest a more intense interest in television news reporting at the highest levels of saudi policy-making than might be the case ifgovernment members had to deal daily with an elected legislature, party political debate and continuous opinion polls. A key questionposed by the dissensus uncertainty model of media influence, however, is whether people from outside the ruling political and businesselites ever get a chance to see their critical views not only represented in the media but also seized upon as compelling evidence of theurgency of a policy shift. In her chapter for the present volume, lina khatib examines the interaction of media, public and policy-makers after the assassination of lebanon s prime minister, rafiq hariri, in with lebanese television stations in the hands of politicalleaders with diverse agendas, television became a symbolic battlefield during this period, between stations that stood opposed to thesyrian military presence in lebanon and those that did not. Khatib recounts the calculated steps that stations took to mobilise theiraudiences. She also shows that, for a brief period, audiences in turn mobilised the medium to serve their own ends. But, as her analysisreveals, the moment soon passed, reinstating the gap between images of public action and behind-the-scenes political reality. In theory,

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