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Tyndall Report's first Cairo timeline noted that the initial reporting on the Tahrir Square protests was as interested in its technology as in its politics. The importance of social networks as an organizing tool was implicitly validated by the Mubarak regime itself, when it shut down the Internet and cellphone service in an attempt to thwart January 28th's Day of Rage. CBS' Lara Logan retraced that online organizing when she pointed to the central role of Facebook in spreading the "outrage among Egypt's youth" at the police brutality that killed Khalid Said last June for posting YouTube videostreams of Alexandria's corrupt cops.
As the protests mature, the crucial medium shifts from the Internet to television. ABC's Lama Hasan introduced us to Shahira Amin and Soha el-Nakash, an anchor and a reporter on state-controled NILE-TV, who resigned rather than lie that the protests had fizzled, as they were ordered. When CBS' Elizabeth Palmer reported on the general harassment of journalists, she pointed out that it was the Arab satellite networks that have "really been handicapped. They are no longer broadcasting live pictures from Tahrir Square so that means many millions of people in Egypt will not be seeing the live coverage." NBC's Richard Engel told us that the offices of al-Jazeera TV had been ransacked.
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