REPORTING TRUTH – ONLINE JOURNALISM, CENSORSHIP, AND THE CREATION OF KNOWLEDGE IN JORDAN

Abstract

Through research grounded in participant observation among online journalists in Jordan, this project contributes to the investigation of longstanding problems in social theory by asking how the relationship between mass communication and politics is changing in the post-internet age. Or perhaps more skeptically, it asks: Is this relationship changing, or do we merely assume that it must be? Focusing on the concept of censorship, where media and politics meet most forcefully, I investigate the intersections of new technologies, journalistic practices, and state control. My dissertation examines how journalists in Jordan negotiate state censorship and understand their own processes of self-censorship as they mediate modernity and political change in a country where political truths are to a great degree contrived and manipulated. My research explores the effects of censorship on digital news transmission – and the effects of digital transmission on censorship – as journalists create knowledge in an evolving media environment. Particularly in the wake of the so-called Arab Spring, new technologies have enabled a cadre of Jordanian journalists and media activists willing to test boundaries, and permitted an explosive media pluralism in the kingdom. In response to this more distributed, smaller-scale media production, the Jordanian state seems to be changing its tactics. Where it earlier relied on newspaper editors to act as gatekeepers, it now relies on cultivating self-censorship in the individual. My research shows that as media production and consumption become more distributed, so must state censorship. No longer centrally negotiated between government and media institutions, it is communicated to journalists through diffuse control, prosecutions of their peers, changing regulatory schema, and professional codes that promote "responsibility" and "balance" on the part of the individual. Nevertheless, there are still avenues of resistance available to journalists at both independent online news outlets and larger state-aligned outlets. I argue that the Jordanian regime disciplines its media to act as a form of window-dressing, in which it performs certain democratic ideals while ceding no power to its citizens and institutions of civil society. Through this strategy, aimed in part toward its own people but primarily at its all-important foreign investors and donors, the state adds a veneer of freedom to its autocratic foundation.