yesterday, the angry arab remarked about how different the coverage of the current pro-hezbollah demonstrations in beirut is from the coverage of the march 2005 anti-syrian demonstrations. it really is a good point. in early 2005, we had daily front page stories about "the cedar revolution." these days, it would be very easy for a fairly well-informed american to be unaware that demonstrations that are just as big (perhaps even bigger) have been paralyzing the lebanese capital for more than a week.
both the washington post and the new york times have articles about the demonstrations today. neither are on the front page (the times' article is on page A3 and the wapo's is on page A13). both articles have pictures, but neither show the throngs of demonstrators as we often saw in 2005. in the times photo you can see about 20 people standing on a ruined church with a caption noting that the people on the church were looking down on "hundreds of thousands" of protesters. in a country of 4 million people, even a single hundred thousand people is huge demonstration, but there just aren't that many images of the endless sea of people in martyr's square as we saw on a daily basis in march of 2005.
the u.s. government has a long history of classifying mass political movements and demonstrations around the world as good or bad. sometimes the throngs of people are labeled footsoldiers in the march of democracy, and sometimes they are labeled anti-democratic hoodlums. the current demonstrations are directed against the bush-backed government of lebanon and so it is not surprising that the administration considers this one to be a bad demonstration. the white house has even referred to it as a coup attempt. despite its rhetoric, the bush administration isn't really about promoting democracy (by that i mean a government that expresses the will of the people) as much as supporting regimes it views as friendly.
but it is interesting that the media itself is following along and not giving the demonstrations the gushing coverage that it did before. in 2005 the bush administration cited the march 14th movement as evidence that iraq was causing a wave of democracy to sweep the middle east. given the administration's own citation of that movement as evidence to support its own iraqi policy, it was natural for the american media to look at the movement more closely. by raising lebanon in its discussions of iraq, the administration was making it part of the domestic political discussion about the war.
this year it is different. the bush administration is not talking much about the current demonstrations. and when they do, i don't hear them relate it to the war in iraq. so, to some extent it makes sense that the media is paying less attention this time around.
then again, i don't think the u.s. media is asking the administration much about the demonstrations either. the relationship is supposed to go both ways. the media naturally should examine what the president says, but it should also question the administration about what it doesn't say. instead of the idealized two-way relationship, the american media tends to follow the agenda set by the white house. if the white house wants to ignore an event in another country, it often is ignored by the press as well. and that is what we are seeing, or rather not seeing, today.
