CNN At The Top

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The TV Watch
CNN Rises to the Top in Egypt Coverage

By Alessandra Stanley
Published: February 4, 2011

Pro-Mubarak forces once again clashed with anti-Mubarak forces on Friday. The brutal set-to didn’t take place in Tahrir Square in Cairo, where as many as 100,000 demonstrators managed to assemble peacefully. The brick-throwing was on cable television, as Fox News and MSNBC anchors continued knocking heads over what’s worse: the dictatorship we know or a democratic rebellion we can’t control.

On Wednesday, Thursday and again on Friday, Chris Matthews, the host of “Hardball” on MSNBC, ridiculed Glenn Beck of Fox News for predicting a conspiracy for world domination by a leftist-Islamic “caliphate.” On Friday morning Steve Doocy, a co-host of “Fox and Friends,” showed a clip of Mr. Matthews likening the Muslim Brotherhood to the Tea Party movement and then asked L. Brent Bozell III, a conservative commentator, to explain “how the mainstream media has been playing down the Muslim Brotherhood, which, as I mentioned a moment ago, does have ties to terror.”

That was just another skirmish in the cable news culture wars, except that the bickering was woven into one of the most critical — and visually riveting — foreign news events in years. In all the confusion, contradiction and multisource coverage in the 11 days since the Cairo uprising began, viewers of American television have been best served by CNN.

The Egyptian crisis has played out live on television minute by minute, hour after hour, in an incongruous clash of the modern and the ancient: the opponents fought with stones and on horse and camel, while the watching world looks on via satellite, Skype, Twitter and flip phone. The uprising against President Hosni Mubarak is as compelling to watch as it is hard to parse; even more than with most major news, it helps to have a reliable narrator.

CNN’s ratings usually lag behind the more excitable competition, but they went up significantly this week, and for good reason. It was Wolf Blitzkrieg: even the more spirited CNN talk show hosts like Piers Morgan and Eliot Spitzer scrapped their planned shows (Kathleen Parker called in sick) and stayed on the news in Egypt, and viewers stayed with CNN. Plenty of other news organizations, including MSNBC and Fox News, are providing analysis and live reports from seasoned correspondents who risk beatings and arrest to report the latest developments. CNN manages to do it all without raising its voice or cluttering the screen with ideologues and deskbound rabble-rousers.

Comedians like Stephen Colbert sometimes mock Anderson Cooper of CNN as a war zone glamour boy and glory hound, but he hunkered down in an undisclosed location on Thursday night and did his job in semi-darkness. Even while being roughed up by mobs attacking journalists earlier in the day, Mr. Cooper sounded more calm and collected than some of the cable news talk-show divas who wind up their viewers from the safety of studio sets.

That was also the case with one of CNN’s best-known alumni, Christiane Amanpour, now with ABC News, who talked her way through a hostile mob and into the presidential palace on Thursday while her competitors were pinned down in their hotel rooms or fleeing the country. ABC got the scoop, but CNN deserves some of the credit.

It wasn’t just luck that landed Ms. Amanpour her exclusive interviews with Vice President Omar Suleiman and President Mubarak. It wasn’t her fame or superior ratings. Ms. Amanpour has spent most of the last 20 years as a CNN foreign correspondent, traveling all over the Middle East, and knew Mr. Mubarak from previous interviews. Her experience showed, both in her firm but friendly manner with the embattled Egyptian president, and in the unruffled way she handled his hostile supporters outside. And Ms. Amanpour’s coup illustrated something else, namely the diminishing relevance of network anchors on the scene. It used to be important for the news division’s top gun to show up in war zones and disaster areas; it signaled to viewers that the story mattered and, most important, it meant that the network could justify siphoning vast resources and technology to tell it. Nowadays, it can take as little as a laptop and a camera phone to do the job, and doing it well requires different skill sets: flexibility, mobility, foreign languages and combat experience matter more than star power and an air of authority.

The ABC anchor Diane Sawyer stayed in New York and let Ms. Amanpour do what she does best. The NBC anchor Brian Williams had rushed to Cairo, followed by Katie Couric of CBS. They worked hard, but in that volatile setting, the network anchors didn’t have much to do; the best reporting was provided by well-connected veterans like Richard Engel on NBC and Lara Logan of CBS. After pro-Mubarak mobs began going after journalists — Ms. Couric was jostled while trying to report live on Wednesday from Tahrir Square — she and Mr. Williams left the country, quite wisely. On Friday Ms. Couric and Mr. Williams were both back in New York.

It’s an unfinished and changing story, but from the beginning, the Cairo uprising gave hundreds of thousands of unprivileged, unheeded Egyptians a voice. So it’s fitting that covering it is giving less eminent but experienced CNN correspondents like Ben Wedeman and Arwa Damon a chance to have their say as well.

A version of this review appeared in print on February 5, 2011, on page A7 of the New York edition.