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Journal-isms Feb. 2

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Fox Journalists’ “Life or Death Struggle” in Cairo

African Americans See Egyptians’ Racial Issues

Reagan’s 100th Birthday Leaves Some Cold

Super Bowl’s 111 Million Viewers Set Record

Fox News correspondent Greg Palkot, head bandaged, right, and cameraman Olaf Wiig describe their beating by pro-Mubarak demonstrators in Cairo. (Video}

Egyptian Military Takes Over Task of Obstructing Journalists

“Egyptian authorities have shifted their strategy for obstructing the press as protests enter their 14th day: The military has become the predominant force detaining journalists and confiscating their equipment rather than plainclothes police or government supporters,” the Committee to Protect Journalists said Monday.

“Authorities have also put in place new bureaucratic obstacles for journalists covering the anti-Mubarak protests on Tahrir Square, with the military instructing reporters to seek new press credentials from the government.

“Foreign editors in the U.S. as well as reporters in Egypt have told CPJ that the government is confiscating press cards and other types of identification and are asking journalists to go to the Ministry of Information to apply for new temporary credentials. Multiple journalists told CPJ that they have been told to acquire accreditation from the government, including one who said he was told by the same thing by the U.S. Embassy in Cairo. (CPJ was unable to reach the embassy to confirm.)

The committee went on to list firsthand accounts and a roundup of new attacks on the press.

“In all, CPJ has documented at least 140 direct attacks on journalists and news facilities since January 30, and is investigating numerous other reports,” the group said.

In one episode, “Fox News correspondent Greg Palkot and cameraman Olaf Wiig were in Tahrir Square during the worst of the violence last week,” Fox News reported Sunday, describing an attack on the journalists last week in Cairo. “When the building from which they were reporting came under siege, they were forced to flee into the streets and right into the middle of pro-government supporters.

“The two were both severely beaten — to the point they had to be hospitalized. The two have now returned to London, and in their first interview since the incident, recounted the danger they experienced.

In another episode, “The Egyptian military detained a correspondent for Al-Jazeera’s English-language news channel for seven hours in Cairo on Sunday, said the network, which has been targeted repeatedly throughout the unrest in Egypt,” Maggie Hyde reported Sunday for the Associated Press.

” ‘The main street was a total war zone, it was smoke, it was rocks being thrown, it was Molotov cocktails, it was flames, it was live fire,’ said Palkot, who with Wiig is a veteran reporter who’s been to war zones throughout the world.

” ‘I got grabbed and I thought at that moment, I thought, “Ok, I’m really now in trouble,” and it was immediately four or five people grabbing hold of you,’ said Wiig.

” ‘People are all over him,’ Palkot said of his colleague. ‘Within about 30 seconds, people are all over us — and that’s where our life or death struggle began.’

“Palkot said he was pummeled with open hands, fists, sticks and rocks. Attackers were ‘principally going for the head again and again and again. The head was the target but the rest of the body is fair game too.’

“Wiig said he thought to himself that surely he could ‘talk some reason into somebody, surely this isn’t, they’re not going to kill us right here.’ And the more they hit you, the more you realized, actually, they probably could right now.”

In another episode, “The Egyptian military detained a correspondent for Al-Jazeera’s English-language news channel for seven hours in Cairo on Sunday, said the network, which has been targeted repeatedly throughout the unrest in Egypt,” Maggie Hyde reported Sunday for the Associated Press.

Fox Journalists’ “Life or Death Struggle” in Cairo

“Fox News correspondent Greg Palkot and cameraman Olaf Wiig were in Tahrir Square during the worst of the violence last week,” Fox News reported Sunday, describing an attack on the journalists last week in Cairo. “When the building from which they were reporting came under siege, they were forced to flee into the streets and right into the middle of pro-government supporters.

“The two were both severely beaten — to the point they had to be hospitalized. The two have now returned to London, and in their first interview since the incident, recounted the danger they experienced.

African Americans See, Experience Egyptians’ Racial Issues

“For too many Egyptians, sub-Saharan Africa is a stereotypical exotic land of thick jungles and masses of poor, starving and black-skinned savages,” reads the blurb over a piece on theRoot.com by Sunni M. Khalid, managing news editor at WYPR-FM in Baltimore and an African American.

“. . . Sub-Saharan Africans, who have fled as refugees to Egypt from Sudan, Ethiopia and Eritrea, are routinely targeted for periodic security roundups in Cairo. In December 2005, Egyptian riot police brutally attacked a camp of Sudanese refugees in Cairo who were protesting their treatment. In front of TV cameras, at least 28 and as many as 100 refugees were killed, and hundreds of others were injured, arrested, imprisoned or deported. There was little public protest.

“My wife, Zeinab, a Kenyan Somali, endured a series of racial indignities during our time in Egypt. She would shop Road Nine, the trendy commercial drag in Maadi that caters mostly to foreigners and wealthy Egyptians. More than once, she would be standing in line at the checkout counter, when an older, fair-skinned Egyptian woman would arrogantly walk from the rear of the line and place her packages on the conveyor belt in front of Zeinab, as if my wife didn’t exist. Indignantly, Zeinab would glare at the woman and dump her packages at the back of the line — or even go so far as to grab the woman by the collar to make her point.

“Whenever my wife would come to the airport to pick me up, she’d often have to fend off several Arab men, who assumed that, as a black woman, she was somehow immediately ‘available’ to their desires, whether she was married or not.”

In a separate piece, Wendell Hassan Marsh wrote of his experience in Egypt, returning to the States last month after spending 16 months studying Arabic as a Fulbright fellow. 

” ‘This government doesn’t care anything about us,’ said Mustapha. ‘They must forget who was here first,’ referring to the indigenous people of southern Egypt who have often complained of being ignored and denied the economic development of their northern counterparts,” Marsh wrote. “However, he could have been speaking on behalf of most Egyptians.”

Reagan’s 100th Birthday Leaves Some Cold

“Like most African Americans old enough to shudder with revulsion when they remember Ronald Reagan’s presidency, I won’t be joining the hagiographical celebration of the late conservative saint’s 100th birthday that is scheduled to take place this weekend. There will simply be too many lies,” Jack White wrote Saturday on theRoot.com.

“The celebrations won’t be talking about it, but neither the passage of time nor President Barack Obama’s oft-stated admiration for Reagan’s transformational politics can make me forget how the Gipper used the fears and resentments of angry white people to get elected.”

Unlike with Reagan’s death in 2004, the news media did make an effort to separate Reagan myth from fact.

Eugene Jarecki, whose documentary “Reagan” aired Monday on HBO, said on CBS News earlier in the day, “It does a great injustice to his legacy to say that he teaches us that deficits don’t matter, as [former vice president Dick] Cheney did, is to lie to the American public. Ronald Reagan felt very great regret about the deficits to which he contributed on his watch. To say that Reagan teaches us that we should be against amnesty for illegal immigrants is to contradict what Reagan himself stood for — that he was in favor of amnesty. Reagan held up at a standard bearer that we should never raise taxes? He raised taxes eleven times while in office.”

But many of the general-circulation evaluations of Reagan at 100 ignored Reagan on race, such as his answer on the night the Martin Luther King holiday bill was passed. He was asked at news conference whether he thought King had been a communist sympathizer. “Well, we’ll know in about 35 years, won’t we?” he responded. He later apologized to King’s widow.

In a Washington Post/ABC News poll in July 1983, nine of every 10 blacks said that blacks had been hurt and not helped by Reagan’s policies, and seven of 10 said they did not think Reagan cared that they were hurting.

“I could make a long, long list of the signals Reagan sent to let racists know that they would have a friend in the White House,” White wrote. “Among them was his decision — urged by, among others, the affably bigoted former Mississippi Sen. Trent Lott — to deliver the first major speech of his 1980 campaign in Philadelphia, Miss., where three civil rights workers were murdered in one of the 1960s’ ugliest cases of racist violence. Reagan gave a ringing declaration of his support for ‘states’ rights’ — code words for resistance to black advances, and clearly understood by white Southerners.”

 

Super Bowl’s 111 Million Viewers Set Record

“Super Bowl XLV Sunday night on Fox averaged 111 million total viewers, according to Nielsen fast-national ratings, making it the most-watched television program in U.S. history, overtaking last year’s Super Bowl XLIV ratings record of 106.5 million viewers,” Andrea Morabito reported Monday for Broadcasting & Cable.

“It is the fourth consecutive Super Bowl to set a viewership record. The game scored a 46.0/69 household rating/share, tying the 1996 Super Bowl as the highest rated Super Bowl since 1986.”

Readers seeking keepsakes packed the lobby of the Green Bay (Wis.) Press Gazette Monday after the Green Bay Packers’ 31-25 victory over the Pittsburgh Steelers.

“It’s been an incredibly hectic and rewarding few days. We have topped 2.5 million page views since 12:01 a.m. Monday, so our 24-hour count ending at 11:59 tonight will go higher,” Executive Editor John Dye told Journal-isms.

“We had to reprint both a Sunday ‘EXTRA’ edition Sunday night (Feb. 6) and today’s (Monday, Feb. 7) edition because of sales demands,” he continued by e-mail.

“Gross press runs for the EXTRA now are 170,000 copies and the total for Monday’s paper is 115,000. We won’t know for several days on actual sales numbers until the unsold ‘return’ copies are returned to the Press-Gazette. Still, those are good numbers for us, with the press run for a typical Monday after a Packers regular season game around 50,000 copies.”

For others, the commercials generated commentary.

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