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As for that revolution in Tunisia, CBS merely mentioned it in passing. At least NBC and ABC both assigned a reporter to narrate the action on the streets of Tunis, voicing over videotape from their London bureaus. ABC's Lama Hasan followed the twitterfeed as President Zine Ben Ali was forced to flee the nation after police had killed two dozen demonstrators. WikiLeaks.org gets part of the credit for helping the protestors mobilize. It published secret State Department cables that revealed the low esteem in which diplomats held the 23-year dictator "outlining the lavishly corrupt lifestyle of the president and his family, a life of mansions and yacht, while the nation suffers under soaring unemployment and food prices; one leaked cable even described how the president's son-in-law owned a tiger and flew in ice cream from overseas." Meanwhile, NBC's Michelle Kosinski pointed out, under the dictatorship, Tunisia had officially been a "US-friendly Islamic country, with a long history of combating terror, supporting education and women's rights."
This is the first time that a WikiLeaks.org-sourced story has resurfaced on the nightly news agenda since the coverage degenerated in December from a high-minded investigation of the United States' global policy into tabloid speculation about Julian Assange's trashy sex life. This is how Tyndall Report traced that decline at the time.
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