To better understand the changing image, status and influence of bloggers, it is useful to compare the concept of media elite to the nature of bloggers post January 25th, as evident in this research’s findings. Comparing the findings to the elements of what constitute media elite helps determine whether the political bloggers are becoming media elite and so limiting the plurality they add to the public sphere.
Media elite and agenda setting
Elite media are defined as “the agenda-setting media because they are the ones with the big resources, they set the framework in which everyone else operates,” (Chomsky, 1997, p.1). Chomsky and Herman (1988, p.5) argue that the media’s top tier, the elite media, sets the agenda for the two remaining tiers. In The Media Elite, Robert Lichter, Stanley Rothman and Linda Lichter have conducted research on 238 journalists from leading American media organizations in 1980 to compare beliefs of journalists to those of the general public and how editorial team’s beliefs biased their reporting. Their research suggests that the media elite in the US is largely very different from the general
public in their backgrounds, status and political orientations (Lichter et al, 1986). Through psychological tests, surveys and content analysis, they concluded that the media, especially elite media, had an overwhelmingly liberal agenda, which yielded biased reporting and an agenda that was rather different than the general public’s. Although their research has been insightful in many ways, their conclusions were often criticized for generalizations, as well as the lack of a national random sample to which they can compare the findings from this study, something Rothman and Lichter admit themselves. “Unsophisticated attempts to ‘objectify’ the problem of media bias through the application of projective psychological tests are thus of necessarily limited value,” (Teachout, 1987, p.346).
Regardless of the generalizability of The Media Elite, other researches on the blogosphere concluded similar findings signifying that bloggers might be becoming the new media elite. Taki found that bloggers in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, are mostly males who are well-educated with at least a master’s degree (2005). Half of her respondents had also studied in Europe or America (ibid). This indicates that bloggers in those countries were born in a certain financial elite that allowed them to become media elite.
Studying bloggers in the US, Mathew Hindman (2008) concludes that bloggers are the new elite in the media world. Hindman concludes that while there are many voices on the internet, only a few of those voices are heard. He finds that the demographics of major political bloggers find an overwhelming emphasis on highly educated and Ivy-league lawyers and academics. He found that the political blogosphere was dominated by an elite class of mostly men without any significant representation of minorities.
In Egypt, one can argue that in the months following the 2011 uprising, online political bloggers have set the agenda for other media, which monitors blogs and social activists to break stories, relay opinions and report on current affairs. They also gained certain status similar to that of media elites. They are becoming similar to the cultural saloons that Habermas contended were places for any works of literature, music or art to gain legitimacy, given the status opinions formed at those saloons had. One could argue that the blogospheres are becoming spaces for providing legitimacy to works and products amongst a certain segment; a trait similar to that of elite media.
Elites trending, search engines and the polarization of the blogosphere
Hindman concludes that one of the main reasons a few voices get heard on the blogosphere is interlinking between popular bloggers, which leads to its domination by only a few star bloggers as well as its polarization as each segment is drawn to communicate with and follow those in their same circles or those whose beliefs fall in line with their own. This interlinking, according to theories of networks, results in popular bloggers getting more and more popular as the interlinking secures them higher spots on search engines. In the meantime, other less-popular bloggers struggle to appear on search engines and so their voices are rarely heard online (Hindman, 2008).
More specific to Egypt, David Faris had already noticed in 2008 that only star bloggers like Hossam El-Hamalawy, Wael Abbas and Nora Younis, are what he referred to as “pushers,” or bloggers who can push stories into mainstream media. Faris explains that the Egyptian blogosphere is a scale-free network, which means, “most nodes will be relatively poorly connected, while a select minority of hubs will be very highly connected,” (2010, p.28). This,
Faris argues, means that according to the science of networks, those well- connected nodes of the network, or prominent Egyptian bloggers, will become more and more connected and so get more popular and dominant. This gap not only continues post-January 25th, but is even prone to growing wider. Given the vast amount of information available online, users find themselves with an information overload. When users first start a Twitter account, for instance, they find themselves faced with hundreds of thousands of possibilities for people to follow. Naturally, they follow those they are familiar with their names, be it from the mainstream media that began hosting bloggers after January 25th, or through their friends’ or Twitter’s recommendations. Those recommendations are usually for Tweeps who have a large number of followers or were validated by their followers as a trusted source in a certain issue. This means that the divide between elite micro-bloggers and lesser- known ones could possibly be growing wider, eventually re-instating their status as online media elite. “Some bloggers are vastly more influential than others, continue to gain further influence, and make it harder for newer bloggers to crack the scene,” (Faris, 2008, p.3). Those star bloggers and Tweeps’ influence on individuals’ opinions is amplified due to an “information cascades” effect, which is a situation where “it is optimal for an individual having observed the actions of others ahead of him, to follow the behavior of the preceding individual without regard to his own information,” (Lotan et al 2011, p.1380). On Twitter, the authors add, this is manifested in the form of re- tweeting and reposting content. This is amplified by the trending topic feature on Twitter, which highlights content that is related and statistically outstanding on the system.
This is why it’s important to study how links between blogs affect their prominence during the content analysis as a step to contribute towards determining whether star bloggers have become media elites, contributing to the limitation and polarization of the blogosphere.
Implications of being media elite in elite media outlets
This shift in status from underground to media elite in elite media outlets has many implications. Chomsky (1997) explains that elite media are institutionalized where there is a certain framework set for their employees and subsequently the mainstream, non-elite media, to abide by. The top media conglomerates also undergo the five news filters Chomsky and Herman laid out (1982). Thus the rules that apply to underground activists are very different than those that the elite media goes by, which makes it important to study this shift in status’ implications in theory and in practice on the political bloggers. 2.5. Funding, Organizational theory and Institutionalization of Blogs /
Blogs as a Business
Although certain blogs might be becoming elite media, most scholarly works ignore the financial aspect of blogging and seem to be predominately concerned with the new media’s democratic potentials. Chomsky argues that elite media are subjected to the editorial pressures that come with advertisements more so than other media outlets (1997). Elite media’s capability to influence the public and reach viewers makes them lucrative to advertisers. Internet also provides organizations the advantage of targeted marketing, of knowing who exactly their advertisements reached and getting statistics on how many people viewed their ads as well as data on where they are from and the language they use.