'Rewired', yet reflects old world media order

Review of The Al Jazeera Effect: How the new media are reshaping world politics, by Philip Seib

Abstract

This book puzzled me at first. Not that it's badly written and organised. It's clear, concise and informed. Nor it is it laden with fantastic theories cooked up by desk bound academics claiming they uderstand the world which perhaps exists beyond their air-conditioning. Seib's analyses seemed grounded in facts as I knew them and appeared mostly right to me. But how did a US-based academic have time and resources to collect, comb through and evaluate diverse information from such distant and dispatrate localtions? I have traveled and worked in many of the places Seib writes about, and trust me, their languages, politics and cultures are not easy to penetrate.