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Will Cairo 2011 turn out to have fleeting street glamour of Paris 1968 without any permanent regime change? Or will it end as blood-soaked as Tiananmen 1989? Or will Hosni Mubarak be toppled as decisively as People Power ousted Ferdinand Marcos in Manila 1986? Or will these events mark the transition from dictatorship to repressive revolution as in Teheran 1979? In the wake of the Million Man March and Mubarak's promise to leave…but not quite yet…Tyndall Report offers a recap and timeline of the coverage of the first week of protests in Egypt on the network nightly newscasts.

It was not until the start of the Egyptian weekend that all three networks decided that the Cairo protests were momentous enough to warrant blanket nightly coverage. That was last Friday, when worshippers turned into protestors, leaving prayers at mosques all over the city to head downtown to Tahrir Square. That was the day when the riot police withdrew their rubber bullets and tear gas and water cannon and were replaced by army troops, who allowed the citizenry peaceably to assemble.

Friday was the day when protestors set fire to the headquarters of President Mubarak's political party and Mubarak himself appeared on television to fire his cabinet, while remaining in office himself. It produced the signature photo-op of the Egypt story so far: the sight of hundreds of protestors in the middle of the street, pausing in their confrontation with riot police, to get down on their knees and pray, obliging the police to observe without interference. On hand to narrate that image were NBC's Richard Engel, ABC's Alex Marquardt and CBS' Elizabeth Palmer.

NBC's Engel filed his first report on the protests on the previous day, arriving in Cairo at the same time as Mohamed el-Baradei, the celebrated United Nations diplomat, who joined the opposition protests. Before that, NBC had relied on its British newsgathering partner ITN to cover the first two days of protest, using a couple of reports (here and here) from John Ray. Marquardt, one of ABC's young generation of one-man-band digital foreign correspondents, had also filed a couple of reports (here and here) earlier in the week.

CBS made the wrong domino-theory call to start the week when it sent Palmer to the region. She started off in Beirut, covering the newly installed Hezbollah-led coalition government of Lebanon, before moving on to Cairo. She played catch-up well enough: her Friday report was her third from the city (the others were here and here).

Andrew Tyndall 2/3/11 5:54:46 pm

© 2010 Tyndall Report