Al Jazeera Was Actually There
Fox News didn’t know where Egypt was. Not metaphorically—literally. Their on-air graphics placed it somewhere in the wrong part of the continent, a detail that got screenshotted and passed around until it became its own small joke. Meanwhile, the country they couldn’t locate on a map was in the middle of a revolution that would reshape the region for a generation.
Tens of thousands of people were in the streets of Cairo and Alexandria, facing water cannons and rubber bullets and occasionally live fire, fighting to remove a president who had been in power for thirty years. The major cable networks were, to varying degrees, elsewhere. When Al Jazeera English’s Cairo bureau was forcibly raided and shut down by authorities, its reporters kept broadcasting anyway—via webcam, via phone, via whatever signal they could hold. The live stream jumped 2,500 percent in viewership. Sixty percent of those viewers were American.
That number is the whole story. Americans weren’t finding this coverage because their own networks were carrying it—most US cable providers didn’t even offer Al Jazeera English. They were actively going around their cable packages to watch a network their government had spent years characterizing as an extremist mouthpiece. What it actually was, it turned out, was journalism. The kind where your reporters stay in the building until the police drag them out.
I spent a lot of that week with the Al Jazeera stream open on one screen and CNN on the other, and the contrast was hard to look at directly. Someone on Reddit put it plainly at the time: It’s sad to see how dependent American news channels have become on ratings. But if more people would rather watch Lindsay Lohan in rehab than the important events happening in the world, then you can’t just blame the media—you have to blame the consumers too.
Fair enough, even if the Fight Club username slightly undercut the authority.
The sharpest detail was that Barack Obama was reportedly getting his Egypt updates from Al Jazeera. The President of the United States, relying on the one network his country’s cable providers refused to carry. The one that had actually sent people to the place and kept them there.
What was happening in Egypt was also a stress test for the global media system, and most legacy players failed it badly. Cable news had spent two decades optimizing for retention over comprehension, for domestic outrage over the difficulty of explaining a foreign crisis to an audience that might change the channel. The result is a journalism that’s very good at covering things its viewers already care about and nearly useless at covering things they don’t yet know they should.
Al Jazeera was built on the opposite premise—the story is where the story is, regardless of audience metrics. You go to Cairo because Cairo is where it’s happening, not because Cairo is trending. In 2011 those two philosophies met head-on in real time, and one of them was still broadcasting when the other had lost the signal.