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Richard Angle of NBC News, who is clearly one of the sharpest, best network foreign reporters working these days, suddenly found his bravery tonight, now that the Egypt revolution appears to have been secured. All of the sudden, Angle is free to say exactly the truth about Mubarak, instead of the mealy mouth, half way truths that normally make up big time reporting, especially on the networks.
Angle called those who went into the streets a week or so ago to fight with the protesters “goons” working for Mubarak. Well, guess what, this was known a week ago, wasn’t it? Instead of calling it straight out, the major media, including newspapers were still saying the counter-demonstrators “appeared” to have been hired by Murbarak. They also reported that people were being paid to join the counter-protests, but they did not make this a central point in the news stories at the time. The massacre and round up for torture of Egyptian citizens made little news during the first week, almost as if it hadn’t happened.
Most media outlets did not highlight the fact that Mubarak had a force of ex-police officers who answered only to him and could kill people without fear of legal charges.(The NY Times reported this early on and the LA Times has had excellent, incisive coverage from Egypt.) We really only got half the story during the first two weeks of the revolution and, only now, are being told the stark facts.
Here is a simple, straight fact: if we had gotten better, stronger and clearer reporting early on, then the Obama administration and the rest of America would have understood much sooner that Mubarak had to go. Instead, we got the usual careful, measured stories that really didn’t make it clear, one, that Mubarak’s paid thugs were beating people to death in the streets and shooting down unarmed protesters and, two, that Mubarak had been running a torture state for decades.
I am beginning to think that the British style of reporting, and across much of Europe, too, is not so bad. There a reporter is sent to a foreign location and is expected to analyze what is happening and tell his readers or listeners. U.S. reporters are allowed to slip in little hints of how they think things might be going to happen at the end of their stories, but many times the hints are so small that they don’t really mean anything.
Richard Angle at NBC is better than most reporters working the foreign beat these days, but it is clear, also, that he is a bit out of his depth at times. Angle, despite his experience in the middle east and reporting in Iraq, is still relatively new to network television news compared with the long term veterans who once covered these beats. He tends to pull back on his reporting when he has a sense of unease about his facts and situation, which clearly applied during the run up to revolution. He seems unsure of just what he can get away with saying, which probably applies to almost all reporters in Egypt on television in the U.S.
Elizabeth Palmer on CBS, normally a steady hand, really played the official line way too much. Clearly, she, and others, were uncomfortable having to assess the situation themselves rather than relying on spokespeople and experts. Not surprising, though: how many revolutions does any reporter get to cover in a lifetime? Palmer used the standard method of local reporters when she didn’t know what to say, she vamped and it showed.
The U.S. government has blood on its hands for the way they coddled Mubarak and others for decades. Thankfully, the blood of the Egyptian revolution did not involve thousands of dead. The best estimate is somewhere around 300 killed in the street events leading up to the occupation of Tahrir square. Make no mistake, this was a massacre of civilians in various places and times across Egypt. There might have been thousands, we don’t know, who were rounded up and tortured in jails during that same time period. Did we, the American public, really understand what was happening? Do most people even understand now?
The U.S. news media also has some of that blood on their hands. They didn’t allow people to be shot or beaten to death, of course, but straight, honest, no holds barred reporting would have, at minimum, been helpful over the three weeks of revolution. A braver, more honest news media will help to make us a better country and to shape public and international policy with human rights in mind.**
It is time that we admit that reporting in both foreign and domestic situations is serious business. Unfortunately, “professionalism”, careful editing and the attempt to appear moderate and responsible often means that facts get toned down or just flat left out. I will confess that in my days of daily, hard news reporting, I also sometimes made this same mistake. Way too often, in fact.
Not until I left the responsibilities of urgent deadlines did I truly see how often the truth gets edited out of the news. This is not some conspiracy to distort. In comes from being overly careful and trying to be balanced, something that just wasn’t necessary when dealing with an autocratic crook like Mubarak. Instead of making stories weaker, we need to find ways to make them stronger and to make certain that the public at least has access to the same facts that reporters are seeing right in front of their eyes.
Doug Terry, 2.12.11
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