You Liked 'Egyptian Revolution'

Frank Rich sums up the exact reason why I have paid virtually no attention to the revolution in Egypt:

The live feed from Egypt is riveting. We can’t get enough of revolution video — even if, some nights, Middle West blizzards take precedence over Middle East battles on the networks’ evening news. But more often than not we have little or no context for what we’re watching. That’s the legacy of years of self-censored, superficial, provincial and at times Islamophobic coverage of the Arab world in a large swath of American news media. Even now we’re more likely to hear speculation about how many cents per gallon the day’s events might cost at the pump than to get an intimate look at the demonstrators’ lives.

Perhaps the most revealing window into America’s media-fed isolation from this crisis — small an example as it may seem — is the default assumption that the Egyptian uprising, like every other paroxysm in the region since the Green Revolution in Iran 18 months ago, must be powered by the twin American-born phenomena of Twitter and Facebook. Television news — at once threatened by the power of the Internet and fearful of appearing unhip — can’t get enough of this cliché.

The vast majority of the coverage I have seen has obsessed over boiling down the events into a handful of talking points of "What does this mean for the US?" And when they're not fawning over how a nation of 83 million people struggling for justice and true democracy may end up being a bad deal for the US and Israel because you never know who will fill the power vacuum when or if Mubarak resigns and we may not be fortunate enough to get another US/Israeli friendly sock puppet in his place, we get breathless commentary about the role that Facebook and Twitter-twat are playing in the revolution. And they did the same thing with the Iranian elections not so long ago, which gave us amazingly retarded slogans such as, "The revolution will be tweeted," and dipshits turning their blogs green to show solidarity with people hundreds of thousands of miles of which they know absolutely nothing of their day to day lives or struggles.

Frank makes another good point about the dismal coverage - that the one network that is in a position to give any meaningful coverage or context, Al Jazeera, is the target of a de facto ban in the US due to its insufficiently deferent coverage of the effects of US foreign policy on the middle east. US administrations, Republican and Democratic, do not tolerate media that is not effectively state run.

So that's really all I have to say about that. In the meantime, I will wait on baited breath to find out from our stalwart media if Mubarak is asking for recommendations on LinkedIn.