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Reforming the Broadcasting Sector in the Southern Mediterranean: A Critical Overview

Tunis: MedMedia Conference (2018), 37 pp.
"The present paper builds on the findings of the previous MedMedia report (Dabbous 2015) by tracking the legal changes that occurred between early 2015 and early 2018. Whenever there are recent legal changes related to broadcasting in general, such changes are mentioned and evaluated. The objective is to provide a critical overview of the state of public service broadcasting and the new regulatory reforms introduced since early 2015, in order to assess the impact of the Arab Spring (directly or indirectly) on the nature and performance of the public broadcasting sector in the Southern Mediterranean region, and the extent to which the wheels that were set in motion in 2011 have resulted in an improved and more democratic public broadcasting sector in these countries – one in which the notion of “the public” is supposed to be at the core of the reform endeavor. The structure of the paper follows largely that of the 2015 MedMedia report on public service broadcasting, covering legal reform in each of the Arab countries in the South Mediterranean separately. However, only 5 of the original 8 countries included in the 2015 report are the focus of the present update: Egypt, Algeria, Libya, Tunisia, and Morocco." (Page 3)