In 2013, the office of Tunisia's first democratically elected president, al-Munsif al-Marzuqi, published an investigation, based on the archives of the presidential palace, entitled Black Book: The Propaganda System under Ben Ali's Rule (Tunisian Republic Presidential Office 2013). It claimed that 376 journalists had taken money from the old regime's communication agency and named ninety of them as ‘friends’ of the regime (‘Le Livre noir des “journalistes amis” en Tunisie sous Ben Ali’ 2013). The book stirred controversy and was criticised for factual errors and its political agenda. Nonetheless, it gave an indication of the scale of collusion between journalists and politicians under the old regime. One of the main aims of the 2011 revolution was to get rid of such corruption and to dismantle the state propaganda machine. Henceforth, the country's journalists would have to reinvent their role. As we have argued in the preceding chapters, this reinvention took place in a context of continuous political turmoil: a hybrid political situation in which both political and business elites were eager to use the media for their own purposes. What kind of journalism emerged from the ashes of Ben Ali's propaganda system? What aims and ambitions did Tunisian journalists have? In this chapter, we focus on how post-revolutionary journalistic ideals clashed with a political reality in which politicians and businessmen sought to instrumentalise the media. We analyse the tensions this clash created among journalists, and the means that critical journalists deployed to retain their professional identity and resist meddling by those with power.

The study of journalistic roles has widened its scope in recent years and increasingly looks beyond the Western experiences that influenced its early thinking. This progress is in large part due to survey-based studies enabling researchers to compare journalistic cultures across the world (Hanitzsch et al. 2019; Mellado 2020b). However, for the sake of deepening our understanding of the norms, ideals and practices that characterise journalism outside the West, sociological case studies are also important (Waisbord 2016).