Role of Social Media

What role should the news media play in a democracy? Do journalists function as watch-dogs in order to check the abuse of power by authorities? Or, is the press an agenda-setter for political decision makers? Is the media part of the state given its ‘fourth estate’ status, or is the media an intrinsic part of civil society? How successfully have the civil society based protest movements used the social media during the recent spate of agitations? Has corporatization of the mass media eroded the journalist’s public role?

Edited by Nalini Rajan, Covering and Explaining Conflict in Civil Society, with nine chapters by individual contributors and an introduction by the editor, attempts to provide answers to the above questions. The book is divided into three sections, each with a different purpose. In the first, the authors report in a comparative framework on the recent global civil society-led protests. Individual chapters range over the Arab Spring, to the lawyers-led agitations in Pakistan, to the Anna movement in India.