Media and Contemporary History between Europe and the Middle East

The project partners Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES), Institut Français du Proche-Orient (IFPO) and the Orient-Institut Beirut (OIB) bring together academics and journalists to discuss media’s structures and processes and its influences in and between the Middle East and Europe.

Since the mid-1990s a rapid change in information and communication technologies has contributed to a fundamental transformation of the media landscape and created new spaces for alternative media and other forms of public expression.

The project partners want to study how these changes have affected the contents of publically available information and how more open forms of communication also provoked new regulations and restrictions. On the one hand, media pictures reflect on assumed and real power relations, while on the other, power relations are inscribed into media pictures as well.

The project aims at analyzing the impact of the media on the composition and de-composition of the typical picture of “the other”, including the broader framework of stereotypical concepts like ‘the West’ and ‘the Muslim world’. Recent developments show - more often than not - how necessary it is to analyze the media’s role in relation to its environment and reception.

In order to achieve these goals, the project partners combine Middle Eastern and Western perspectives, the academics’ and the practitioners’ views as well as inter- and cross-disciplinary approaches.

The conferences so far:

• BMF 2005: The Influence of the Virtual Dialogue in the Media on the European-Middle Eastern Relations;
• BMF 2006: Public Opinion and the Media between Europe and the Middle East;
• BMF 2007: Middle Eastern Conflicts in the Media – Censorship and Representation.
• BMF 2008: Media Discourses on Islamist Movements.