-------------------
Just a notes.
AJE live stream was pretty damned good. So old fashion mass media that gets in the street or gets into the moment works in conjunction with social media. AJE had a crew just monitoring twitter. They summarized the basic thrust of the messages. Then Inside Story, another of their regular programs, assembled various people, some from the commentariat, some academics or people who specialized in Egypt and the Middle East, and usually somebody more closely associated with the events in the street.
These people where quite unlike the US spin masters from the foreign relations think tanks associated with the Washington establshment. On Empire another AJE program, they had Thomas Pickering, with Sy Hersh, and Kalid(?) Rashid. It was pretty clear that while Pickering was pretty good, his mind had already been corrupted from years as part of the US establishment.
``They pale in comparison to the thousands of labor actions, strikes, politicization of the Egyptian working class in the last few years. Have we forgotten that the internet was shut down in Egypt for a week with almost no apparent effect on the uprising?'' Peter Jay
Yes good points. Although I had to dig to find this background. Anyway, I watched AJE through most of that shutdown. AJE was pretty adapt at getting out stories anyway by dodging NileNet which was evidently the main network servers shut down. I think they used a different cell phone or land line system to Doha for street reports. The effect was something like the ancient recordings of war time radio from London to New York during WWII.
``Yes, I saw the Ghonim interview. It was pitch perfect.'' Joanna.
I saw it too, and it didn't come across as any kind of break down. More joy and relief, gratitude that the collective got him out.
As good as AJE was, it still showed its limitations by asking many of the same dumb questions, like where's your leader? Or, they kept referring to violence without specifically indentifying the sources and relative balance of forces and actions.
But the focus on leadership was particularly annoying. Establishment media of any sort is not used to dealing with a variety of people who compose different aspects of the same collective. They can't get out of the hierarchy of bosses. In turn this is part of the beauty of Tahrir, i.e concrete collective democracy.
For example. I was just sitting talking in the best job interview I ever had. My job was to join what I know with a collective, community, service delivery run outside normal channels, since all of them are broken in both the public and private sectors.
I was sitting across from the director. To my left was the deputy director. Over on my top right was the finance, budget, accounting director. Then to my low right, one chair over was the community organizer, volunteer coordinater and general community PR woman. Everybody in the room was struggling with how to develop a truly collaborative social service model. The director was the lead and was the essential `leadership', but that was not what was really going on.
I was working my brains out on topic after topic, theory, practice, experience, things tried, things failed, reasons. One of the best practical political discussions I ever had---or much like the very beginning, so long ago, most of the people I once knew are dead and buried.
Now the committee are going to look at the general community opinion about me. Thankfully I have my factions. Let's hope my factions win....
All of this was taking place in the new Ed Roberts Center, named after a locally famous disabled political activist. Here is the amusing part. Ed emerged as the Leader of a movement that had no leaders. But media, history, establishment political science can not get it through their collective head that many social and political movements have no Leader. Instead, various factions produce leading members...
CG