Egypt and Media

It's one of those rapidly changing events that takes on a life of its own. At the moment, the Friday demonstrations are close to their scheduled beginning, and there are fears that the Egyptian government is planning a violent suppression.

There's a story going around, originally from the New York Times and apparently confirmed elsewhere, that the U.S. is working to get Mubarak to step down immediately, perhaps Friday. (Even if that happens, I'm skeptical--that v.p. doesn't seem much of an improvement, and the rest of the apparatus is still entrenched.)

But the other story that's getting less play, and is to me also pretty significant, is quoting State Department sources as saying that the attacks on journalists the past 24 hours were organized by the government. That it's the State Department speaks volumes about the Obama Administration U.S. position. It's not on the side of the current government.

For those of us who remember China, who remember the fall of the Wall, the fall of the Shah in Iran etc., the TV pictures are eerily familiar, though these examples show the range of what might yet happen. I haven't watched much TV coverage until today, but a couple of things are different in potentially very bad ways--I mean about the coverage. Most obviously there is FOX that covers this only from a predetermined ideological perspective, with talking parrot heads pushing an extreme rabid right agenda that they partly seem to have cooked up themselves. They've got their vocabulary set, and their "experts" on board, who have remarkable little to say that's different one from the other. For those who think they're getting their news from FOX, and instead they're getting one or more paranoid alternative realities, it's a sad and potentially destructive situation.

The other quite noticeable difference is the absense of the channel that the world used to watch for coverage of these events: CNN's Headline News. It used to be that Headline News did the hard news coverage, while CNN provided longer and more in depth stories. You could switch from one to the other. Now when you switch from CNN to what's now called HLN, you go from Egypt to celebrity chitchat and tabloid crime. It's very jarring, and pretty depressing.