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If the tentacles of Hosni Mubarak's regime--manifest in his political party, his army, his secret police, his street cops, his goon squads--had too labyrinthine a sprawl for a single correspondent to grasp, coverage of the Moslem Brotherhood, the opposition grouping, suffered from the contrary problem. It hinted at specters of the Brotherhood's hidden agendas and ulterior motives, without reporting any evidence.
CBS anchor Katie Couric darkly called the Brotherhood "a group many people consider extreme" without further explanation.
ABC's Christiane Amanpour repeated Hosni Mubarak's warning of a Brotherhood takeover if he were to resign unquestioningly, without commenting on its likelihood. Later she found "a lot of anxiety" among the Tahrir Square protestors that the Brotherhood was hijacking their movement, even as she quoted Essam el-Erian, the Brotherhood's leader, pledging support for "a civil state, a democratic state."
NBC's Andrea Mitchell, using mere association rather than actual reporting, told us about "the big fear" inside-the-Beltway--no attribution for the fear--that if the Brotherhood joined a coalition government in Cairo "continued chaos would open the door to al-Qaeda, which has its roots in Egypt." As for the Brotherhood's policy towards Israel, "some elements…have pledged to preserve the peace treaty," she conceded, insinuating, without saying so, that other elements had not.
CBS' Mark Strassmann filed the fullest profile of the Moslem Brotherhood, "religious conservatives, often secretive and poorly understood…frequently harassed and arrested by Mubarak's state police." He ran through their Islamist platform, their provision of social welfare charity, their venerable status, their electoral success, their rejection of violence--and a vague caveat about "some exceptions," their support for Palestine, their opposition to al-Qaeda…and to Hamas…and to the state of Israel, their mix of moderate and hardcore views.
Then Strassmann left reporting behind and substituted fanciful speculation. Catch the weasel words possible gateway in this "worry" he detected from "some" unidentified critics in Cairo that "the Brotherhood's political rise is a possible gateway to Islamic extremism." Strassmann Skype'd an inside-the-Beltway think tank to ask what is "scary" about the Brotherhood--not much, it appears, just uncertainty about how it might change were it to attain power--and concluded with "lots of deep suspicions."
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