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Joe Flint at Los Angeles Times had one more worry: that the arrival of Big Feet detracts from coverage because it changes its focus--from the protests themselves to the relationship between the protests and the news media's coverage of them. That is a fine point, to say the least, and not one that was borne out by last week's events in Cairo.
Point taken. It is true that ABC's Christiane Amanpour did turn the fact of her "get" with Hosni Mubarak into almost as big a story as the contents of his comments, describing her tension-filled drive to the Presidential Palace and her exploration through its somber corridors. Next day she described how the protestors of Tahrir Square interviewed her, in turn, about the demeanor of their 32-year dictator. Yet this is not a criticism of Amanpour's clout--it is a testament to it.
Next, what Flint describes--switching the focus to the media from the underlying protests--is not the agenda of the networks' news divisions but the propaganda technique of the regime itself.
"Vice President Omar Suleiman says the protestors should go home and blames the foreign media for the unrest"--CBS' Katie Couric.
"The government is once again sending a message to its people that foreign journalists, the Moslem Brotherhood, and big business are somehow involved in a major conspiracy to incite violence…the vice president accuses foreign journalists of trying to bring this country to its knees"--NBC's Richard Engel.
"Now they have really taken it out on the press. They are blaming the press, these pro-Mubarak supporters, for all their woes and they are very menacing"--ABC's Amanpour.
"There seems to have been a real campaign to dismantle satellite dishes; arrest, intimidate, harass journalists"--CBS' Elizabeth Palmer.
"In the last 24 hours at least 100 reporters and photographers have been attacked, largely by people who say they are Mubarak supporters, and that this international spotlight has helped bring their president and their country down"--ABC's David Muir.
No, if there is a drawback to deploying Big Foot resources for a story such as this it is that the job of anchors is to go mano-a-mano with newsmakers: their presence has tended to emphasize the top-down exercise of sclerotic power over the bottom-up dynamism of revolutionary fervor. So, ABC's Amanpour not only interviewed Mubarak but also Suleiman, the head of the military secret police. CBS' Couric and NBC's Brian Williams both sat down with Mohamed el-Baradei, the former United Nations diplomat at the atomic energy agency. CBS' Couric watched the street fighting in Tahrir Square from the rooftops with Ibrahim Kamel, the general secretary of Mubarak's political party.
And these powerful members of the ruling regime flat out lied to these Big Feet. "These few people that are standing in the square are not Egypt nor the Egyptians…They are part of a minority," Kamel claimed, later assuring her that Mubarak's approval rating stands at 90%. Mubarak told ABC's Amanpour that "agitators" not his own supporters, were those who attacked the protestors with horses, camels, firebombs and Molotov cocktails: "He even at one point--so did the other minister--suggest that the Moslem Brotherhood was behind it."
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