Reporting the Referendum

Al-Jazeera's coverage of the referendum led the 11:00 (EST) newscast.  They first showed the NDP "rallies" which SP mentions in comments below:

Then, they show Egyptian Information Minister Safwat Sharif defending the referendum and urging Egyptians and the world to look to the future:

Then, they interview two ordinary Egyptians, a man and a woman. Both are critical of the referendum, basically saying that they want democratic reform but don't support this constitutional change.

They also show quite a few images of empty polling stations and half-asleep ballot collectors:

The original report did not contain any images or interviews of the opposition, oddly enough - no Kifaya or MB protests. I can only surmise that the arrests of the al-Jazeera correspondents last week had some kind of deterrent effect, or else that security was so tight that the cameras couldn't get close enough to the protests.  There was a separate, short segment on the protests narrated by the anchor, Fayruz Ziyani, rather than by the reporter on the ground.  Here's a capture:

Finally, since she narrated the "protest" segment, here's a gratuitous shot of anchor Fayruz Ziyani, just for the heck of it:

Bottom line:  al-Jazeera is not treating this like a major event, but they aren't ignoring it either.  They seem to be playing it fairly straight:  the coverage reflects a deep skepticism, but they aren't going over the top in the other direction by only showing protestors. The coverage reflects the broad trends but is rather less revealing than the was the very interesting episode of More Than One Opinion about the Egyptian referendum the other day, which Mona mentioned in comments. 

Not very satisfying coverage, to be honest, but we'll see if it changes over the course of the day.  Where is Ayman Nour?  Where is Abdullah Sanawi?  Where are the Kifaya spokespeople?  Where's the Muslim Brotherhood (okay, they are all in jail...)?

Oh, one more thing:  as I said in comments to the last post, anyone in Egypt right now feel free to post eyewitness accounts of any of this stuff here - or tell me if the coverage on some other Arab TV station is notably different.  How's al-Hurra doing?

UPDATE:  the 1:00 (EST) news ran the exact same report from Cairo, with a slightly longer addendum on the violent response by security forces.  The host mentioned something about the al-Jazeera cameraman, but I wasn't listening carefully enough to catch it. 

another update:  the 4:00 Hissad al-Yom (Today's Harvest) is much better - interviewing lots of opposition figures, showing graphic footage of protestors being pummeled by security forces and by thugs... 

Comments

[Daniel]

Safwat Sharif is speaker of the majlis ash Shura nowadays, but as speaker, he´s the head of the Political parties comitte, and then he´s still Secretary general of the NDP.

[the aardvark]

Dang it, you're right.. he got booted from Information, didn't he? My bad. But Sec Gen of the NDP is just as good.

[SP]

Those of you in the US - what kind of play is this getting in the media there? I saw one bland article in the NYTimes and that was about it. Is NPR covering it? CNN? NBC?

[SP]

Addendum: Has anyone else noticed that the headlines of articles about the referendum almost all read something like "Referendum marred by violence" - as if violence is something that happens passively and abstractly, without agency - and some of them, like the NYT article, almost don't mention that the violence was perpetrated by NDP goons on peaceful protestors. I assume the famed "balance norm" of US journalism is at work here, pushing journos to try to show "both sides of the story." This is chillingly similar to the reporting of anti-Muslim pogroms back home in India, where state-sponsored goons going after carefully identified targets translated in the press as "riots" and "clashes" between religious communities. (The state government in question insisted that the attacks on Muslims by their Hindu fanatic goon squads were the result of "natural anger" and a reaction to "provocation"). The casual reader could be forgiven, then, for thinking that this was not targeted violence. Journalists should be careful about this.