Wednesday, February 02, 2011

egypt interests

update: Lileks on the abysmal coverage of the riots in Egypt:

"Here’s the problem:

I can’t stop watching the live feed on Al-Jazeera. I’ve watched dawn break on Liberation Square in the last half hour, watched Molotov cocktails arc across the screen, the thin bands of “pro-Mubarak protestors” – goons, in other words, security forces in street garb – heaving stones at the protestors...

Nothing on DirecTV covers the story. Nothing. CNN at this moment has Piers Morgan – who? WHO? – interview Baba Fargin’ Wawa about something or other, which is like cutting into the news of the Iranian revolution to grill Hedda Hopper about her favorite interviews.

Oh, update: CNN is now showing a video of events in Cairo at 4:45 AM, because they’re replaying the Piers Morgan show. I don’t know what Barbara Walters is saying about it, and I couldn’t care less.

Okay, I turned the volume up. She was talking about the protests but now she’s back to discussing her early career... I have a dish on the roof talking to a satellite in space, and I can’t pull down one channel covering this. I wonder how many other people are stabbing the remote, thinking hey, I’d like to see the story covered. It’s got to be somewhere between these 47 juicer informercials and preconception-reinforcing talk-shows.

...National and international news has to be updated hourly, or it’s still fishwrap. Without the added functionality of, you know, actual fishwrap."


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update & bump: here's more insight

this is one of the few articles i could find that was more concerned with the big picture of what's currently happening in egypt than that country's internet cutoff.

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