Introduction

Building on extant scholarship about media systems, this chapter provides a set of criteria to examine the Arab countries, and by doing so, to allow a comparative analysis. Taking into account the various issues previous studies have had with such classifications, we designed the benchmarks of our analysis to reflect the various factors that intertwine to both draw similarities and highlight differences in the media among the Arab countries. As such, the aim of this chapter is to classify Arab media along a set of dimensions in order to better understand the overall systems that characterize media in the Arab region.