Replication data for: Debating Media Freedom in the Arab World

Recent upheavals in the Arab world have sparked renewed interest in understanding its media environment. There is a common perception that Arab media has been tightly controlled and managed by autocratic leaders, particularly by using the issue of Palestine as a political tool to deflect popular attention from pressing domestic issues. We seek to use sophisticated statistical methodology to test this widespread assumption. Using a matched data set with a relevant peer group, we find that media freedoms in the Arab world are no more restricted than other comparable cases. This suggests that the “Palestine” tool is not as effective as is often believed. We begin to develop methods for testing how Arab leaders use Palestine as a political tool by finding proxies for the intensity of the Arab-Israeli conflict and pointing out directions for future research.