Marc Lynch provides a comprehensive overview of the historical rise of new Arab media and public spheres, in which Arabs attempt to break stereotypes and represent themselves, giving voice to views and ideas that are usually absent in both their state-controlled media and Western media. Building on Jürgen Habermas's (1992) The Structural Transformation of the Bourgeois Public Sphere, which traces the rise of the bourgeois public sphere in eighteenth-century Europe, Lynch examines whether Arab countries are developing liberal public spheres of information, debate, and consensus. Using Habermas, Lynch identifies progressive features of the new Arab public spheres, but also indicates limitations.

According to Lynch, the emergence of satellite television channels like al-Jazeera and of the Internet are creating a new Arab public sphere outside of the previous monopoly over the flow of information sought by Arab states. This public sphere recognizes the value of debate and differences, and allows disagreement. It has forced politicians to justify their policies and has created a new level of accountability. Yet such a public sphere is “rife with paradoxes. It is fueled by a determination to bring publicity to the closed, repressive Arab political world, shattering every taboo and crossing every red line with abandon. At the same time, its politics of identity could all too easily slide into a tyranny from below, excommunicating those who disagree and demonizing outsiders to enforce internal unity” (pp. 3–4).

At present, Lynch asserts, the direction and effects of a new Arab public sphere are unclear, but already “political talk shows have transformed the nature of Arab public opinion, [and] the impact of the news coverage has similarly revolutionized political behavior” (p. 5). Such news and discussion have produced impassioned debate “on the so-called Arab street,” ranging from the “fierce demonstrations sparked by al-Jazeera's coverage of the American-British bombing of Iraq in December 1998” (p. 5) to waves of protest and fighting between Palestinians and Israel in 2000 and 2002. Likewise, the U.S./UK intervention in Iraq in 2003 created an uproar in the new Arab public spheres, as did waves of protests “demanding political reform that swept from Lebanon through Egypt into the Gulf in the first months of 2005” (p. 5).

While the emergence of al-Jazeera in 1997 was a major factor in the rise of an Arab public sphere, Lynch's readers will recognize that this sphere is much more than the one TV network. It encompasses competing satellite television stations, independent newspapers and journals, online news sites, and official state media that have also been subject to some democratic transformation. As with Habermas's bourgeois public sphere encompassing literary salons, pubs, and a rising intelligentsia, the new Arab public sphere, according to Lynch, “comprises Islamic networks and mosques, NGOs and transnational organizations, and prominent public figures and intellectuals. It includes a vast Arab diaspora that is increasingly able to maintain contact with and actively engage with the politics of the Arab world through information and communications technology” (p. 22). Indeed, the Internet has made it possible to circulate Arab newspaper and television reports, as well as a diversity of views and debates.

In a chapter titled “The Structural Transformation of the Arab Public Sphere,” Lynch discusses historical stages and the emergence of an Arab public sphere. While there were influential Arab media like Voice of the Arabs, Egypt's radio service of the 1950s, the 1970s and 1980s are described by Lynch as “The Dismal Years” in which Arab media tended to be tightly state-controlled and repressed. A “Domestic Liberalization” that followed in the early 1990s saw the rise of an explosion of newspapers in Jordan; the emergence of papers, competing television stations, and magazines in Yemen; and even a brief liberalization of media in Kuwait following the 1991 Gulf War. This brief opening was followed in turn by a “Retreat,” which created the market conditions for the emergence of al-Jazeera, a proliferation of other Arab broadcasting outlets and voices, and the emergence of the Arab public sphere.

A chapter titled “The al-Jazeera Era” documents the television network's beginnings in 1997, its rise to prominence in the Arab world following the U.S./UK bombing of Iraq in 1998, and its central role in presenting the Israeli-Palestine conflict and other issues of the region to Arab publics. Yet for Lynch, it is with the buildup to the 2003 war against Iraq and the eventual U.S./UK invasion and occupation that the Arab public sphere came into its own. While during the Afghanistan war a global public came to see and hear of al-Jazeera, perhaps for the first time, it was during the Iraq war that the channel became the subject of vilification by American leaders and media, as well as a subject of heated debate among Arabs. However controversial, the rise of Al-Jazeera meant that the United States no longer controlled media frames of major events, but rather that a diversity of perspectives appeared in the global arena and Arab voices competed with Western ones for the hearts and minds of people throughout the world.

Lynch concludes that there has emerged “A Real Public Sphere” which is “characterized by self-conscious, open, and contentious political argument before a vast but discrete audience” (pp. 247–48). It is not clear if it will become a “liberal public sphere,” full of diverse opinions and tolerant of opposing views, and free of state interference, because “the politics of the Arab public sphere tend toward populism, the politics of identity, of authenticity, and of resistance” (p. 26). While signaling possible limitations, Lynch's conclusion holds open whether the new Arab public sphere will become “a populist public or a liberal public” (p. 248).

The book is timely and has broader implications. The author's “Call for Dialogue” with emergent Arab public spheres (p. 249 ff) is surely relevant to current discussions of “democracy promotion” and U.S. foreign policy. In calling attention to the Bush administration's failed approach to the Arab public sphere—which has involved treating it either as “an enemy to be defeated (in a ‘war of ideas’) or as an object to be manipulated (via public relations)” (p. 250)—Lynch underscores the importance of “real dialogue” aimed at real mutual understanding.

One could argue that the author idealizes a too homogeneous “Arab public sphere” in the same way that Habermas's critics claim that he idealized the “bourgeois public sphere.” Rather, there is arguably a diversity of Arab public spheres, just as there were a “proletarian public sphere” (Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge in their 1993 book Public Sphere and Experience), women's public spheres, and those of diverse groups and movements in the West.

Voices of the New Arab Public does not refer to events after 2005, and since then there has been a dramatic expansion of Islamic media and voices that tend to be underplayed in his narrative. Yet clearly, the rise of Arab news media has created a new situation in which public opinion and political action can be shaped outside of traditional political elites in the Middle East, and there are new possibilities for Arab consciousness and union, as well as diversity and conflict within and new dialogues with the West without. While maintaining an open and critical position, Lynch looks for democratic potential in the new Arab media and public sphere, which he hopes will present a broad range of Arab voices, counter Arab and Islamic extremism, and give Western voices a fair chance to participate in a dialogue.