Mainstream Media Behind the Curve in Reporting Arab Revolts

Bob Schieffer, the longest-serving journalist in Washington, second only to his CBS colleague Andy Rooney, spoke to my American University students on February 16, 2011. Responding to an event participant's question about the performance of U.S. media in covering the substance of the sweeping revolts in the Arab world, he said "we're still trying to figure out what is going on!" His honesty was refreshing, but it is an admission of an utter confusion and failure by mainstream media. This state of affair was not caused by lack of skill; the impotence resulted from the astonishment of the media establishment in America in the face of events that trashed everything western media has known about submissive Arabs obeying dictators and fearing the show of force.

The utter shock has led some western reporters to even violate a basic ethical and professional requirement: checking the facts before reporting them. New York Times reporter Nicholas Kristof was in Manama, Bahrain when the Al-Khalifa regime ambushed the protesters in Pearl Roundabout on February 17, 2011. He lent credence to the government's assertion that the protest was sectarian. Without sharing any facts he told world television channels that all the injured were Shia. He did not even claim survey data. Sure, the vast majority of organizers are Shia, but so is the population of Bahrain. The sectarian character of the protest is not known from the religious identity of protesters; it can be known from the demands of the movement. Those demands focused on reforming the political system into a constitutional monarchy, hardly sectarian or even radical. In fact the king has been open to such possibility since 2002.
The western media utter failure in reporting the Arab uprisings stands in sharp contrast to the performance of al-Jazeera English. I remember a few days before Mubarak stepped down Wolf Blitzer asked a Department of State official what was going on in the White House Situation Room. She told him that people there were asking about the Egyptian opposition, what they're thinking and what they want. While CNN was airing spin of pundits sitting in their Washington offices, knowing very little about so much, Al-Jazeera English was answering the very questions the American official was posing. It was ranning interviews with English speaking leaders of the protest talking about their activities and demands. Most of Al-Jazeera English reporters are either westerners or western-trained. So the problem is not the western attribute of the mainstream media.
There are two factors explaining why mainstream media has trailed behind al-Jazeera. First, most of the editors, are aging with worldviews formed in the sixties, if not earlier; their ability to catch up with fast moving events thousands of miles away is limited. Clearly fresh blood is needed. But this is not an excuse. The media in western democracies represent a fourth power; its bankruptcy in meeting the demand of the public for factual information and reasonable analysis of historic events is crucial for the very maintenance of democracy. By failing to perform the function expected by the public, the mainstream media is no mainstream at all.
Another explanation of the failure lies in the fact that the large corporate structure of the media industry is part of the political establishment that for so long has valued stability in the Middle East. While the Egyptian protesters mobilized several million demonstrators today, February 18, 2011, to celebrate the revolution and call for the removal of the remainder of the Mubarak regime, including the current government, Hilary Clinton had just announced an aid package of $150 million to it--an old school measure that does not sync with the revolutionary mood in the country. The Egyptian revolution is not over, but the Egyptian generals and the U.S. government are acting as if life were back to normal. But one has to give the U.S. government come credit that the establishment media does not deserve: the U.S. has learned from past mistakes. In 1979 the U.S. government and media agitated against the Iranian revolution, calling Iranians to side with the Shah even as the momentum was building in favor of the opposition. In 2011, the U.S. stood against the violent treatment of protesters, despite some valid misgivings about some of their leaders (particularly the Muslim Brotherhood).
In contrast, most mainstream media outlets exhibited an isolationist worldview in their interpretation of event. Journalists like Joe Klein were paraded on the various networks raising the specter of a Chinese-style Tiananmen Square massacre to end the gathering at Tahrir Square, or pundits who after the departure of Ben Ali suggested using American aid money to promote oxymoron ideas such as "discriminating democracy" to exclude even modernist Islamists like the Tunisian Ennahda (Renaissance) (See Robert Satloff editorial, Washington Post, January 30, 2011). Alas, Islamophobia is perhaps the unfortunate factor behind the mainstream media ambivalence toward the pro-democracy movement in the Arab world.