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TYNDALL HEADLINE: HIGHLIGHTS FROM FEBRUARY 4, 2011
When Tyndall Report completed its first timeline on the mass protests against Hosni Mubarak's regime in Cairo's Tahrir Square, the dictator had agreed to leave eventually and the army had agreed to let the masses assemble unmolested. The Big Feet had arrived: two broadcast network anchors--plus a veteran foreign correspondent turned Sunday morning host--were on the scene to monitor democracy blooming in the heart of the Arab World. Tyndall Report's second timeline traces the regime's backlash, followed by the current standoff.
TYNDALL PICKS FOR FEBRUARY 4, 2011: CLICK ON GRID ELEMENTS TO SEARCH FOR MATCHING ITEMS
CAIRO TIMELINE CONTINUES AS PROTESTS TURN TOXIC When Tyndall Report completed its first timeline on the mass protests against Hosni Mubarak's regime in Cairo's Tahrir Square, the dictator had agreed to leave eventually and the army had agreed to let the masses assemble unmolested. The Big Feet had arrived: two broadcast network anchors--plus a veteran foreign correspondent turned Sunday morning host--were on the scene to monitor democracy blooming in the heart of the Arab World. Tyndall Report's second timeline traces the regime's backlash, followed by the current standoff.
The indelible photo-op of the second half of last week was as violent and chaotic as the indelible photo-op of the first week was peaceful and orderly. The symbol of the earlier, successful, occupation of Tahrir Square had been the sight of masses of protestors, in the middle of a bridge across the River Nile, shaming riot police into inaction by praying en masse (on ABC, on CBS, on NBC) in front of them. Its counterpart on Wednesday was the sight of partisans of Mubarak's repressive regime careening through the crowd on horseback and astride camels, whips flailing, hooves flying (on ABC, on CBS, on NBC). The protestors scattered. A pitched nightlong battle ensued, with fires flaring from Molotov cocktails and pavement ripped up to make missiles for stone-throwers.
The upshot of peaceful protest degenerating into street battle was that both broadcast anchors--NBC's Brian Williams and CBS' Katie Couric--abandoned their quest to be on hand when history was made and retreated to their desks back in New York City. "The atmosphere suddenly turned sour and toxic," lamented NBC's Williams before heading off to Amman on his way home. NBC had turned its newscast into a special edition, entitled Rage and Revolution, for the first four days of the week.
ABC's Christiane Amanpour showed us her driver's broken windshield, shattered after crowds assured her they literally hated her; her colleague David Muir narrated how his cameraman Akram abi-Hanna was carjacked and threatened with beheading. NBC's Lester Holt had his car blocked: "You talk about turning on a dime. It is whiplash."
SCOOP AMANPOUR Both returning anchors filed week-ending features (Katie Couric's on CBS here, Brian Williams' on NBC here) summarizing the narrative arc of the story so far. The remaining celebrity journalist in the broadcast ranks, Christiane Amanpour of ABC's This Week, recently arrived from CNN, cashed in her years of experience in the region when she parlayed a scheduled on-camera interview with Vice President Omar Suleiman at the Presidential Palace in Cairo into an impromptu q-&-a with Mubarak himself.
"I have been in public service for 62 years and now I am fed up and I want to retire but if I resign now there will be chaos," was how ABC's Amanpour quoted Mubarak. All her quotes were indirect since she was unable to use her video camera (still photos only) or her microphone to document her scoop. Nevertheless, it established ABC's leadership in Egypt coverage despite the absence of anchor Diane Sawyer from the scene--and despite the fact that on two days last week ABC actually decided that the winter weather deserved to be its lead story instead. In all, last week, ABC (54 v NBC 73, CBS 68) found the Egyptian story least newsworthy. When CBS' Couric, in her perch above strife-torn Tahrir Square, reported on Amanpour's headline quote from Mubarak, she commented sarcastically: "There is chaos already."
The 195 minutes that the three broadcast networks spent on the Egyptian story last week accounted for fully 67% of the three-network newshole: thisclose to the 200 minute threshold, which, believe it or not, has been surpassed in a single week on only 21 occasions in the 23 years of the Tyndall Report database. The last time the 200-minute mark was reached was in the spring of 2007, when a massacre on the campus at Virginia Tech left 33 dead. Before that, New Orleans was inundated because its levees failed to withstand Hurricane Katrina's storm surge.
FLINT’S TAKE ON BIG FEET The fact that CBS anchor Katie Couric left Cairo after only two days on the ground and that NBC anchor Brian Williams lasted only one day more has left Big Foot journalism vulnerable to criticism. Los Angeles Times media writer Joe Flint opted for a disparaging attitude at his Company Town blog after he and I discussed the pros and cons by e-mail.
I had ticked off the virtues of the practice: the reasons why the networks should make the effort to send major anchors to the scene of a huge story. First, it sends a signal to viewers of the importance of the events being covered; second, it increases the likelihood of landing major newsmaker interviews; third, it encourages the network to flood the story with other resources to back the anchor up; fourth, it builds the anchor's long-term expertise, experience and perspective.
Flint countered with the disproportionate expense incurred by the anchors and their entourage: "Is this the best way for TV news divisions to utilize their resources?" he wondered, offering the irrefutable observation that "while the networks will say that the security of all their staffers is paramount, rest assured, a lot more precautions are taken when a $15m-a-year anchor is there as opposed to a freelance producer or part-time correspondent."
Instead, Flint argued, the same money could be spent on beefing up general regional coverage with reporters permanently assigned there. "Perhaps the answer is to do more foreign reporting and less fluff--rather than shipping a big name overseas every time a major story surfaces." His is the losing argument inside the suites of the network executives for the time being. The giant overseas story of 2010--the catastrophic earthquake in Port-au-Prince--generated a similar response as the Cairo protests: saturation coverage led by Big Foot anchors.
MAKING THE COVERAGE THE STORY 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."
MUBARAK’S TENTACLES An adverse consequence of the Big Foot instinct to see Egyptian politics as an arena for personalities rather than institutions was a confused picture about what was at stake in these protests. Were they designed to remove Hosni Mubarak the man? Or were they in opposition to the Mubarak regime? When anchors try to answer that question by seeking out individual political leaders for interviews they end up misleading viewers about the mechanism by which power operates in Egypt's police state. This week we have seen the regime operate in five separate manifestations, receiving varying levels of scrutiny, with almost no explanation as to their coordination, or lack of it.
First, the networks have failed, so far, to file a single story about the military intelligence apparatus controled by Vice President Omar Suleiman, the newly-appointed power behind Mubarak's throne. CBS' Elizabeth Palmer reported on a self-styled Committee of Wise Men, who had proposed leaving Mubarak in power as a figurehead with the parliament dissolved and Suleiman in charge pending elections. Yet she offered no details about either Suleiman's power base or his allegiances--apart from calling him Mubarak's "intimate."
Second, a thumbs up to CBS' Palmer for her profile of the 468K-strong Egyptian military as an autonomous political and economic actor, one-third funded by the Pentagon. London-based Palmer used leaked State Department cables as part of the source material for her story, without crediting WikiLeaks.org. Here is Palmer's account of her symposium with WikiLeaks.org founder Julian Assange last November.
Third, Palmer's colleague Lara Logan retraced disgust at the repressive role of the secret police as a key organizing element in the #jan25 protest movement. She took us back to Alexandria last June when Mubarak's agents pummeled Khaled Said to death for posting an incriminating videostream on YouTube, showing corrupt police pocketing the spoils of a narcotics bust. CBS' Logan called Said "a middle class businessman;" NBC's Ron Allen labeled him "a 28-year-old blogger."
Fourth, the commitment of the armed forces not to use force to intervene in the Tahrir Square protests was a double-edged sword. It meant that the masses could assemble peaceably on Tuesday and on Friday; but it also meant that pro-Mubarak forces could attack the protestors unmolested on Wednesday. NBC anchor Brian Williams replayed the play-by-play commentary he filed for MSNBC from his hotel rooftop with correspondent Richard Engel of the nightlong streetfighting that ensued. "It's Mad Max!" he exclaimed. Army tanks then broke their pledge of non-intervention by laying down a smokescreen to separate the two sides. NBC' Engel noted that the intervention occurred after anti-regime forces had gained the upper hand and the smoke allowed pro-regime forces to retreat to safety.
Fifth, when those horsemen and camel-jockeys rode into the crowd, some reporters were unequivocal that they were an arm of the regime; others swallowed the regime line that they represented an authentic, grass-roots counter-protest. NBC's Engel was most direct, calling them "goon squads disguised as supporters" and reminding us that Mubarak often used such non-uniformed enforcers "to stuff ballot boxes and forge elections." Marie Colvin, the battle-hardened, eyepatch-wearing, war correspondent for London's Sunday Times assured CBS anchor Katie Couric that "they were bused in; some of them were paid; quite a few are government employees. That simply does not happen in Egypt without official sanction." On ABC, David Muir neutrally called them "pro-Mubarak demonstrators," treating the idea that the attack had been orchestrated by the regime as a he-said-she-said debate, attributing the allegation to the convictions of the beaten protestors.
THE BROTHERHOOD BOGEYMAN 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."
I WANT MY AL-JAZEERA TV 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.
FOOTNOTES There have been two angles of the Egypt story that received scant attention as the second week unraveled: the role of the United States in shaping events; and the vox pop of the people of Cairo.
Cairene anecdotes included a couple of neighborhood features from ABC's Lama Hasan, on commercial life at a standstill and on neighborhood watches against looters. CBS sent Mark Strassmann to the souk and Terry McCarthy to the airport. NBC became fixated on Mary Thornberry, a 76-year-old expatriate from Fort Worth, living in an apartment overlooking Tahrir Square. Grandma Thornberry was subject to daily updates (here, here and here) as threatening gangs slept in her building's hallways. NBC seemed taken with this single human interest story because of one golden soundbite: "I'm apt to whop 'em with my rolling pin."
By contrast, the networks are to be congratulated for downplaying Washington's role in Cairo's fate. President Barack Obama's stated policy is that Egypt's political future is for the people of Egypt to decide and that worldview has been reflected in the reticence of the networks' DC bureaus to grab airtime. From the White House, ABC's Jake Tapper offered a brief stand-up here and NBC's Savannah Guthrie here. CBS anchor Katie Couric had Richard Haass of the Council on Foreign Relations speak for the foreign policy establishment. Haass expects an eventual military coup.
From the Pentagon, David Martin contributed to CBS' In Focus series, with this question: "Is the day of the repressive corrupt Arab regime over?" The United States has relied on "authoritarian" regimes for decades to guarantee its overriding pair of strategic regional goals: freely flowing oil at reasonable prices and absence of war with Israel. "Giving power to the people of the Middle East could validate American values but undercut American interests," Martin concluded drily. He did not really mean "giving" since such power is not in the gift of the USA.
WHAT’S NEXT? The week ended with stalemate--and the two longest-deployed network foreign correspondents on this story, CBS' Elizabeth Palmer and NBC's Richard Engel, were willing to look into their crystal balls. CBS' Palmer suggested that "ultimately, the business community" might be the political bloc to force Mubarak from power. "This country has been brought to a standstill by the upheaval and many people are losing millions." NBC's Engel saw the calming of tensions as a deliberate change in tactics from the regime. "For now Hosni Mubarak's strategy may be just to wait out the protests, if he can."
Unlike Engel, ABC's David Muir divined no such future indicators from the square's calmer mood: "With so many questions about what could come next, the people in that square have not gotten there yet. They are just savoring the victory that they feel they have witnessed here this week."
The indelible photo-op of the second half of last week was as violent and chaotic as the indelible photo-op of the first week was peaceful and orderly. The symbol of the earlier, successful, occupation of Tahrir Square had been the sight of masses of protestors, in the middle of a bridge across the River Nile, shaming riot police into inaction by praying en masse (on ABC, on CBS, on NBC) in front of them. Its counterpart on Wednesday was the sight of partisans of Mubarak's repressive regime careening through the crowd on horseback and astride camels, whips flailing, hooves flying (on ABC, on CBS, on NBC). The protestors scattered. A pitched nightlong battle ensued, with fires flaring from Molotov cocktails and pavement ripped up to make missiles for stone-throwers.
The upshot of peaceful protest degenerating into street battle was that both broadcast anchors--NBC's Brian Williams and CBS' Katie Couric--abandoned their quest to be on hand when history was made and retreated to their desks back in New York City. "The atmosphere suddenly turned sour and toxic," lamented NBC's Williams before heading off to Amman on his way home. NBC had turned its newscast into a special edition, entitled Rage and Revolution, for the first four days of the week.
ABC's Christiane Amanpour showed us her driver's broken windshield, shattered after crowds assured her they literally hated her; her colleague David Muir narrated how his cameraman Akram abi-Hanna was carjacked and threatened with beheading. NBC's Lester Holt had his car blocked: "You talk about turning on a dime. It is whiplash."
SCOOP AMANPOUR Both returning anchors filed week-ending features (Katie Couric's on CBS here, Brian Williams' on NBC here) summarizing the narrative arc of the story so far. The remaining celebrity journalist in the broadcast ranks, Christiane Amanpour of ABC's This Week, recently arrived from CNN, cashed in her years of experience in the region when she parlayed a scheduled on-camera interview with Vice President Omar Suleiman at the Presidential Palace in Cairo into an impromptu q-&-a with Mubarak himself.
"I have been in public service for 62 years and now I am fed up and I want to retire but if I resign now there will be chaos," was how ABC's Amanpour quoted Mubarak. All her quotes were indirect since she was unable to use her video camera (still photos only) or her microphone to document her scoop. Nevertheless, it established ABC's leadership in Egypt coverage despite the absence of anchor Diane Sawyer from the scene--and despite the fact that on two days last week ABC actually decided that the winter weather deserved to be its lead story instead. In all, last week, ABC (54 v NBC 73, CBS 68) found the Egyptian story least newsworthy. When CBS' Couric, in her perch above strife-torn Tahrir Square, reported on Amanpour's headline quote from Mubarak, she commented sarcastically: "There is chaos already."
The 195 minutes that the three broadcast networks spent on the Egyptian story last week accounted for fully 67% of the three-network newshole: thisclose to the 200 minute threshold, which, believe it or not, has been surpassed in a single week on only 21 occasions in the 23 years of the Tyndall Report database. The last time the 200-minute mark was reached was in the spring of 2007, when a massacre on the campus at Virginia Tech left 33 dead. Before that, New Orleans was inundated because its levees failed to withstand Hurricane Katrina's storm surge.
FLINT’S TAKE ON BIG FEET The fact that CBS anchor Katie Couric left Cairo after only two days on the ground and that NBC anchor Brian Williams lasted only one day more has left Big Foot journalism vulnerable to criticism. Los Angeles Times media writer Joe Flint opted for a disparaging attitude at his Company Town blog after he and I discussed the pros and cons by e-mail.
I had ticked off the virtues of the practice: the reasons why the networks should make the effort to send major anchors to the scene of a huge story. First, it sends a signal to viewers of the importance of the events being covered; second, it increases the likelihood of landing major newsmaker interviews; third, it encourages the network to flood the story with other resources to back the anchor up; fourth, it builds the anchor's long-term expertise, experience and perspective.
Flint countered with the disproportionate expense incurred by the anchors and their entourage: "Is this the best way for TV news divisions to utilize their resources?" he wondered, offering the irrefutable observation that "while the networks will say that the security of all their staffers is paramount, rest assured, a lot more precautions are taken when a $15m-a-year anchor is there as opposed to a freelance producer or part-time correspondent."
Instead, Flint argued, the same money could be spent on beefing up general regional coverage with reporters permanently assigned there. "Perhaps the answer is to do more foreign reporting and less fluff--rather than shipping a big name overseas every time a major story surfaces." His is the losing argument inside the suites of the network executives for the time being. The giant overseas story of 2010--the catastrophic earthquake in Port-au-Prince--generated a similar response as the Cairo protests: saturation coverage led by Big Foot anchors.
MAKING THE COVERAGE THE STORY 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."
MUBARAK’S TENTACLES An adverse consequence of the Big Foot instinct to see Egyptian politics as an arena for personalities rather than institutions was a confused picture about what was at stake in these protests. Were they designed to remove Hosni Mubarak the man? Or were they in opposition to the Mubarak regime? When anchors try to answer that question by seeking out individual political leaders for interviews they end up misleading viewers about the mechanism by which power operates in Egypt's police state. This week we have seen the regime operate in five separate manifestations, receiving varying levels of scrutiny, with almost no explanation as to their coordination, or lack of it.
First, the networks have failed, so far, to file a single story about the military intelligence apparatus controled by Vice President Omar Suleiman, the newly-appointed power behind Mubarak's throne. CBS' Elizabeth Palmer reported on a self-styled Committee of Wise Men, who had proposed leaving Mubarak in power as a figurehead with the parliament dissolved and Suleiman in charge pending elections. Yet she offered no details about either Suleiman's power base or his allegiances--apart from calling him Mubarak's "intimate."
Second, a thumbs up to CBS' Palmer for her profile of the 468K-strong Egyptian military as an autonomous political and economic actor, one-third funded by the Pentagon. London-based Palmer used leaked State Department cables as part of the source material for her story, without crediting WikiLeaks.org. Here is Palmer's account of her symposium with WikiLeaks.org founder Julian Assange last November.
Third, Palmer's colleague Lara Logan retraced disgust at the repressive role of the secret police as a key organizing element in the #jan25 protest movement. She took us back to Alexandria last June when Mubarak's agents pummeled Khaled Said to death for posting an incriminating videostream on YouTube, showing corrupt police pocketing the spoils of a narcotics bust. CBS' Logan called Said "a middle class businessman;" NBC's Ron Allen labeled him "a 28-year-old blogger."
Fourth, the commitment of the armed forces not to use force to intervene in the Tahrir Square protests was a double-edged sword. It meant that the masses could assemble peaceably on Tuesday and on Friday; but it also meant that pro-Mubarak forces could attack the protestors unmolested on Wednesday. NBC anchor Brian Williams replayed the play-by-play commentary he filed for MSNBC from his hotel rooftop with correspondent Richard Engel of the nightlong streetfighting that ensued. "It's Mad Max!" he exclaimed. Army tanks then broke their pledge of non-intervention by laying down a smokescreen to separate the two sides. NBC' Engel noted that the intervention occurred after anti-regime forces had gained the upper hand and the smoke allowed pro-regime forces to retreat to safety.
Fifth, when those horsemen and camel-jockeys rode into the crowd, some reporters were unequivocal that they were an arm of the regime; others swallowed the regime line that they represented an authentic, grass-roots counter-protest. NBC's Engel was most direct, calling them "goon squads disguised as supporters" and reminding us that Mubarak often used such non-uniformed enforcers "to stuff ballot boxes and forge elections." Marie Colvin, the battle-hardened, eyepatch-wearing, war correspondent for London's Sunday Times assured CBS anchor Katie Couric that "they were bused in; some of them were paid; quite a few are government employees. That simply does not happen in Egypt without official sanction." On ABC, David Muir neutrally called them "pro-Mubarak demonstrators," treating the idea that the attack had been orchestrated by the regime as a he-said-she-said debate, attributing the allegation to the convictions of the beaten protestors.
THE BROTHERHOOD BOGEYMAN 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."
I WANT MY AL-JAZEERA TV 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.
FOOTNOTES There have been two angles of the Egypt story that received scant attention as the second week unraveled: the role of the United States in shaping events; and the vox pop of the people of Cairo.
Cairene anecdotes included a couple of neighborhood features from ABC's Lama Hasan, on commercial life at a standstill and on neighborhood watches against looters. CBS sent Mark Strassmann to the souk and Terry McCarthy to the airport. NBC became fixated on Mary Thornberry, a 76-year-old expatriate from Fort Worth, living in an apartment overlooking Tahrir Square. Grandma Thornberry was subject to daily updates (here, here and here) as threatening gangs slept in her building's hallways. NBC seemed taken with this single human interest story because of one golden soundbite: "I'm apt to whop 'em with my rolling pin."
By contrast, the networks are to be congratulated for downplaying Washington's role in Cairo's fate. President Barack Obama's stated policy is that Egypt's political future is for the people of Egypt to decide and that worldview has been reflected in the reticence of the networks' DC bureaus to grab airtime. From the White House, ABC's Jake Tapper offered a brief stand-up here and NBC's Savannah Guthrie here. CBS anchor Katie Couric had Richard Haass of the Council on Foreign Relations speak for the foreign policy establishment. Haass expects an eventual military coup.
From the Pentagon, David Martin contributed to CBS' In Focus series, with this question: "Is the day of the repressive corrupt Arab regime over?" The United States has relied on "authoritarian" regimes for decades to guarantee its overriding pair of strategic regional goals: freely flowing oil at reasonable prices and absence of war with Israel. "Giving power to the people of the Middle East could validate American values but undercut American interests," Martin concluded drily. He did not really mean "giving" since such power is not in the gift of the USA.
WHAT’S NEXT? The week ended with stalemate--and the two longest-deployed network foreign correspondents on this story, CBS' Elizabeth Palmer and NBC's Richard Engel, were willing to look into their crystal balls. CBS' Palmer suggested that "ultimately, the business community" might be the political bloc to force Mubarak from power. "This country has been brought to a standstill by the upheaval and many people are losing millions." NBC's Engel saw the calming of tensions as a deliberate change in tactics from the regime. "For now Hosni Mubarak's strategy may be just to wait out the protests, if he can."
Unlike Engel, ABC's David Muir divined no such future indicators from the square's calmer mood: "With so many questions about what could come next, the people in that square have not gotten there yet. They are just savoring the victory that they feel they have witnessed here this week."
