I just wanted to write a quick note about media coverage of what’s been going on here in Cairo.
I haven’t had much access to outside media over the past eleven days, but I managed to watch a few hours of BBC and CNN coverage last night. Most of the coverage highlighted the ongoing clashes between demonstrators and Mubarak’s goons. The footage, the commentary, the anchor’s questions to correspondents on the ground all seemed focused on the violence. But what wasn’t communicated on either network while I watched was that there were more than one hundred thousand people in Tahrir Square at the time.
It’s a huge space, and I went back and forth between the front line and the center of the square where there was a relative measure of safety several times throughout the day. The distance between where the front developed and the center of the square is about five hundred meters. Unsurprisingly, all of the journalists were cloistered at front.
There has been real violence here over the past twelve days; I’ve witnessed a great deal of it especially on the first few days of the revolution and on Wed of this week. But a whole lot of other things have been going on. And a group of several hundred men throwing stones is always going to be more newsworthy than the thousands standing behind them.
My point is just that journalism skews towards sensationalism and narrow story lines -and I’m as guilty of that as anyone else. But that’s why my experience on the ground yesterday was so different from the scenes I witnessed on television (of course, it doesn’t help that footage is looped). The scope of events – and geography – is much larger a single camera lens.
