A single cry breaks the air and captures our minds. More cries erupt and build our captivation. More and more and more are added until they blur into each other and become nothing but a mess of white noise.
The news coverage of the Egyptian protests is truly impressive. On the New York Times home page, there is a photo slideshow of the 18 days of protest, a video about Egyptian president Hosni Mubarek stepping down, an interactive map of the protests and eight articles analyzing different aspects of its significance. My daily email news alerts are brimming with the latest story updates about the state of democracy in Northern Africa.
Believe me, I can appreciate the beauty of an excellently covered story and revel in the number of ways a story can be fed to me. But, am I alone when I say that all this Egypt coverage makes the overall message dull down?
Pew Research Center for the People & the Press released a report last Wednesday that shows that although people are more focused on Egypt, the coverage far surpasses the audience’s interest level. Egypt occupied 56 percent of media coverage last week, the most of any foreign news story. The Egyptian protests were more heavily covered than last year’s Haiti earthquake or last fall’s Chilean miners, even though the latter two had far higher interest ratings among American audiences. Of the 1,001 American adults surveyed by Pew, one third said they read Egypt news stories more than any other topic last week, but nearly the same amount said they were most interested in the “snowpocalypse.” Coverage of Egypt swamped media outlets while coverage of the record blizzard only occupied eight percent of all the news.
Clearly, the protests are more significant than the giant snow dragons people built around the U.S., but if today’s media caters to its audience (as my freshman Medill classes tell me they do), shouldn’t this disparity be a little less defined?
Of course, when topics have immediate relevance or fall into an area that people are passionate about, I want to see it covered from every angle and play with every multimedia option I have. When The Daily covered “brothelgate” a few weeks ago, I was glued to every article and Twitter update. That’s doesn’t mean international news is not as important simply because it won’t potentially throw us out of our living arrangements. I followed the 2009 XinJiang Uighur riots in China obsessively because I was interested in seeing how religious tension in Western China played out in both American and Chinese media. The plea for democracy around the world is an incredibly reverberating tale, but all this Egypt coverage makes it easy for me to dismiss the situation and think, “Oh, another Egypt story.”
Every time I click on an Egypt update, I am struck again by the sweeping sense of revolution, solidarity and change felt by the Egyptians. Every time I eye through a photo slideshow of the protests, I am reminded that people are willing to undergo such intense pain and injury to advance their country. This is an important story. If I am moved by each story I entertain, why, then, is it so easy to drown out the headlines? The more I am bombarded by the story, the easier it becomes to dampen the plight. Even if each article offers a poignant anecdotal lead, a gripping analysis of U.S.-Middle East relations or harrowing pictures of bandaged people, I scroll through and click on a review of Broadway musical “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” instead.
A single cry is not enough, but white noise drowns it altogether. Striking the perfect balance between a good amount of coverage and too much is difficult, but it’s a stride news outlets must take.
Karen Chen is a Medill freshman. She can be reached at [email protected].
