Book Review: Media, Power, and Politics in the Digital Age: The 2009 Presidential Election and Uprising in Iran

Abstract

Media, Power, and Politics in the Digital Age: The 2009 Presidential Election and Uprising in Iran. Yahya R. Kamalipour, ed. New York, NY: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010. 314 pp. $65 hbk.As 2011 unfolded, few people would have predicted that a political movement-perhaps rooted in the desire for democracy-would have commenced in Tunisia and then spread rapidly to multiple North African and Middle Eastern nations. One country that was minimally affected by this movement was Iran; nevertheless, as Yahya Kamalipour's book recounts, Iran had been hit by a political bombshell two years earlier.The facts pertaining to the 2009 presidential election, as told by Western news agencies, are that the Iranian government manufactured voting results to ensure that the incumbent, Mahmoud Ahmadenijad, was reelected to the presidency. What followed, according to those accounts, was a groundswell of political rallies that demanded that the results be overturned. They were not, and subsequent protests eventually were met with a show of force from the nation's security forces that led to multiple deaths.Media, Power, and Politics in the Digital Age examines an important element of the storyline from the 2009 protests-the role that social traditional and news sources played in telling the story. If the book had gone no further than that, it would have offered important insight into what took place in Iran. Unfortunately, many of the essays driftoff-topic or have little to do with examining the role of the media.Kamalipour, head of the Department of Communication and Creative Arts and director of Center for Global Studies at Purdue University, collects works by more than twenty scholars on topics relating to the Iranian elections from perspectives all over the map. St. Anselm College politics professor Jonathan M. Acuffprovides one of the most important essays, suggesting that the West especially was too quick to proclaim that social media caused the 2009 protests. U.S. particularly cable news, tended to accept a certain line of reasoning emanating from media experts themselves and neoconservative think tanks because it coincided with the conventional wisdom in these organizations-new media matter, he writes.At the time of the American Revolution, Acuffsays, the pamphlet was new media, as was the fax machine during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. These technological marvels of those eras were no more responsible for causing those historical events than Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube were in 2009 (or in 2011, for that matter). He adds that the media neglected to examine various factors, including the power of Iranian institutions and the absence of a charismatic opposition figure, that blunted a possible revolution. …