CAIRO: “Revolutions are a cascade of events, one leads to another … [there are] sources of comprehension and incomprehension,” Todd Gitlin, professor of journalism and sociology, and chair of the PhD communications program at Columbia University, said during a lecture at the American University in Cairo (AUC).
“Movements are not events which the media understands and there is no standardized entity with a label thus there is usually incomprehension by journalists,” he said at the lecture titled “Media about Revolutions: Comprehension and Incomprehension.”
Gitlin explained that media coverage of uprisings and revolutions is classified into blackouts, which are events that are significant in the protests but not so in the media, ray-out, which are events that are considered “background noise” and not considered significant, and trivialization, referring to ongoing “events that are not peculiar to the media,” he said.
When covering radical political events, incidents that cause a strong reaction or involve violence are considered newsworthy.
Furthermore, during the media coverage of these events, which usually do not have a prominent figure as a leader, “journalists take it upon themselves to find one, and there is a tendency to grab to people they think are newsworthy,” said Gitlin.
“These people become celebrities by virtue of being reported upon,” he noted.
The force of the new media and the speed and reach of images instantaneously is a significant force on the development of the cascade of events, he explained.
“When people feel instantly aware, they feel the possibility to act on it may intervene in history,” he said.
“This possibility of instant reaction, forces such as governments and others, who feel they have something is in stake in these events feel the need to intervene and help shape the outcome of these events,” he explained.
As for the impact social media has taken on during the recent revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia, Gitlin pointed out that its “easier to report on what’s going on through social media,” saying international news organizations rarely have foreign bureaus as they are costly.
However, “technologies also create possibility for censorship and false information,” he noted.
“There is a limited spread of social media, analytically we should be paying more attention to Al Jazeera and its effect in these events,” Gitlin said.
“To set up a system of independence is crucial, [the editorial staff] can’t be appointed or be fired by government officials, even elected government officials,” he said.
Gitlin recalled in his lecture the media coverage of the revolution in Russia.
Journalists Walter Lippmann and Charles Merz in 1920 examined coverage of the Russian Revolution in what was by then the country’s greatest newspaper, The New York Times.
Their conclusion was "The chief censor and the chief propagandist were hope and fear in the minds of reporters and editors.”
“The view they [the media] accepted was that of what the State Department wanted to give the people, and they were siding with the old regime in favor of their alliance [in World War I],” explained Gitlin.
“Therefore, news are controlled by the hopes of men who dominate the news organization…its dangerous for journalists to rely on anonymous sources, whether they are official or semi-official,” he noted.
