Bill Ullman on Egypt

Our friend Bill Ullman sent Joe and me what I think is the keenest take on Egypt and world press coverage of the uprising that I've seen anywhere. It is reproduced below. Bill is a former Africanist business operative/do-gooder/good world citizen. He now lives in Undisclosed Location, Maine. Bill has been this blog's most faithful reader and busybody fact checker and persnickety copy editor for four years. Over the years he has performed the latter task for others, including the late Ted Sorenson. There are many Ullman Africa stories. My favorite is, the newspaper in Windhoek, Namibia, once referred to him, after he left the country, as "the mysterious William Ullman."

Hello Dick,

I probably spent more time glued to Al-Jazeera over the past two weeks

than anyone other than Mubarak’s intel goons. The unfolding of the

drama/chess game had me enthralled from start to finish. First ever

experience watching (most of) a revolution live from beginning to end

(of the first stage only, to be sure). Emotionally I was on the side of the

protesters, of course, and occasionally shouted out in glee or dismay

as the tide seemed to be running one way or the other. My enthusiasm

was informed, but not diminished, by the uncertainties of the

geo-political consequences of success, the possible costs to U.S.

strategic interests (I’m not sure I give much of a shit about Israel

anymore, though we cannot allow its annihilation) and the knowledge

that revolutions often replace the awful with the horrible. The pot

boiling over in Egypt entails all kinds of risks for the stability of

the status quo, but in my view the status quo has been heading us in

dangerous directions for a long time. We’re going to have problems, but

they won’t be quite the same frozen in place problems that were on the

table up to last Friday. (And frankly, losing much of our access to

Arab oil might be the best thing that could happen to us, bringing a

little reality into the mixture of myth and delusion that governs many

American perspectives these days.)

You correctly note that A-J’s coverage was biased, but it was a

different kind of bias from what we are unhappily getting used to from

Fox, MSNBC, talk radio, et al. While the emotional tilt of the

reporters was clear, they didn’t express it in the words they spoke;

they pretty much simply described what they were seeing and what the

people they had access to were saying; and since what they saw we did

too, it didn’t take any pro-protester presentation-bias to persuade us

about where we stood. The actual events, day-by-day, said it all.

As for the actual events portrayed and the hundreds of interviews

conducted, the A-J producer on the ground and his many reporters

repeatedly said that they were trying to interview pro-government

people, whether village peasants, cops, government functionaries or

thug groups. What they invariably met with was threats of violence,

actual violence, confiscation of equipment, detention and a refusal to

say anything or be filmed. This response was orchestrated non-stop by

the regime, whose state TV was broadcasting until early Friday morning

that A-J was not a legitimate news organization, but an arm of U.S. and

Israeli intelligence. Still the A-J kids had the guts to keep trying.

Bottom line: the coverage bias was not A-J‘s doing; it was the product

of the regime’s fear of letting even its own supporters speak out

freely.

The A-J- “kids” (they were mostly quite young) were superb. When it

came to providing background info, they were vastly more informed and

relevant than just about any of the U.S. press; they had Egyptian and

regional history at their fingertips; there was absolutely none of that

relentless self-congratulation that pollutes CNN coverage, or that

“Look at me, a big personality reporting from a dangerous location”

crap. Being both multilingual and multi-cultural they knew how to do

interviews that spoke both to local and foreign audiences, and they

took full (often risky) advantage of mixing with the crowds while

almost all of the big-shot western reporters were clearly comfortably

removed from the immediate action. There were a few isolated

exceptions, but not many.

I’ve been tracking Al-Jazeera for a long time. I can’t speak to the

quality/bias of coverage by the Arabic division which has different

producers and reporters, but the English section consistently offers

better coverage of international (not just middle eastern) news than

anything we still have after the budget cuts and general dumbing-down

that have reduced American TV news to the level of a morning cooking

show for women, mixed with what could pass as trailers for the

latest sadistic chainsaw movie. A-J has the money, the technology, the

reporters and the motivation that CNN has lost (and sadly, BBC is

losing, though it’s still pretty good). As for NPR & PBS, their

international news budgets were gutted years ago (and the Republicans

may well succeed in a few weeks with their efforts to totally de-fund

the Corporation For Public Broadcasting).

Viewership of A-J in the U.S. has been extremely limited by (1) the

refusal of big cable companies to carry it, partly no doubt influenced

by (2) our government’s frequent insinuations that A-J is somehow

related to terrorism (channeling Mubarak!) and (3) the willful, utterly

self-defeating ignorance of the vast majority of our Know Nothing

citizenry whose indifference to the rest of the world and its

widespread child-like credulity about domestic issues are now earning

it the fucking that the Republicans (and not a few of the Democrats)

are so eager to deliver.

I feel good that this year you have up-graded to air conditioning.

=Bill=