What I noticed, though, was this. When people talk about the movements in Tunisia and especially Egypt, it is with an air of total hope, pride and agreement. And the mainstream media coverage is in large part responsible for informing that view, for perpetuating it in the way these stories are covered. Aside from a few articles questioning the future of Israeli-Egypt relations should Mubarak's regime fall, there never seemed to be any question in anyone's mind (except Ezra Levant in a February 1 Ottawa Sun piece) as to whether the protests in Egypt were inherently good. Coverage was glowing. Any and all damage or problems were attributed to police, paid Mubarak thugs, unruly elements. Never were the protesters generally described as anything other than great. Which was fine for me, because that happens to gel with my personal view, and I was happy for the Egyptians and Tunisians for what they had done and the future they could now hope for.
But then I thought about what this discussion could have been about if it had happened a month earlier, or if Tunisia and Egypt hadn't happened yet. A discussion about the way the media dealt with the student protests in the UK would not have been this positive. Mainstream coverage of domestic protests almost always focuses on what goes wrong. The biggest stories to come out of the tuition fee protests were the damage at Millbank Tower, the kid who threw the fire extinguisher off the roof of said tower, the attack on Prince Charles and Camilla's car, and Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour's son Charlie's various charges for his involvement. There was no talk of revolution. There was no obvious slant to the reporting that said what the students were protesting for was right or wrong, no tone that made them obvious heroes. There were quotes from protest organisers and student leaders condemning the violence and saying it was caused by a small minority, but this didn't translate into the media coverage in the same way it later would for Egypt. Most people would look at the TV coverage or the newspapers the next day and say, "Look at those students destroying everything." There were citizen journalists, bloggers, Twitter users out there during the protests, posting their views on what was happening, reports and pictures of police brutality or peaceful activity. But there was no media embrace of these people, no big fuss about how Twitter was revolutionising the movement, no scramble to identify the most important bloggers/tweeters and make sure we always had their opinion.
And so, why the difference? Before the Q&A part of the Frontline Club event, and right before my phone died and I lost the ability to follow the livetweeting of it, I tweeted, "Different stories here - does msm romanticise protests elsewhere but vilify them at home?" Then, realising where I was, I decided to put the question to the panelists - between a protest leader, a BBC editor, the CEO of a citizen journalist website and an Al Jazeera reporter with experience in the British media, surely there would be some interesting ideas? People asked many questions about the role of social media, all met with long, thoughtful comments from the speakers. Finally, it was my turn, and I asked about the difference in the way international and domestic protest is covered. Does it have to do, I wondered, with political or corporate agendas, with a plurality of views available, with an inability to identify a definite enemy, with having more reporters on the ground and not needing the Twitter view?
And the answer was...nothing. The question was virtually ignored. The moderator, actually, said it was a great question and commented that as a former foreign correspondent, he could attest to the fact that in foreign reporting you are allowed to sort of "take a view" on things, to decide who are the good guys and the bad guys and report from that perspective. He then deferred to the BBC editor, who shook his head and said he had already spoken a lot tonight. The Al Jazeera reporter said that the question didn't really apply to her as Qatar-based AJ doesn't really have any news. And so, in a joke about the lack of anything happening in Doha, the question was lost and the panelists moved on to the next one. I was disappointed. I had really hoped for some answers on this.
When I got home, I saw a tweet from the BBC editor, responding to my last comment, saying "good point". When I asked him for his views again, he said they were "not for public consumption". The next day, I noticed a discussion between the website CEO and someone who had attended - and the CEO commented that he was more interested by my question than the point they were discussing. You know, the question he didn't say one word about at the debate.
In the end, I was left with two questions. One: what are the factors that contribute to such differences in the way protests are covered at home and abroad? I have some ideas, ranging from the fact that the public's a lot less forgiving about damages when it's their own stuff being destroyed, when it's their city up on the TV screen, to political influences in editorial decisions, to snobbery about the role of citizen journalists, to the need to simplify international problems into good guys and bad in a way we can't do here, to the fact that you just can't get everyone behind hating David Cameron and Nick Clegg in the way you can for Hosni Mubarak. And two: why don't journalists want to talk about it?
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