Month: January 2011

EGYPT AT THE CROSSROADS

EGYPTIAN PATIENCE WEARS THIN

“We are a river country,” an Egyptian friend once told me when I marveled at his country’s patience with corrupt, incompetent and repressive regimes. “We go on and on.”

Perhaps. But that legendary patience with the bumbling but stubborn, 82-year-old President Mubarak seems to be wearing out.  Change is coming to Egypt, either very soon or shortly thereafter. And what happens in Egypt matters, to Egyptians, of course, but also to the U.S., Israel and the entire Arab world.

Diminished as it may be today, Egypt remains the centerpiece of the Arab world. With its population of 80 million, it is not only the largest Arab country. It is historically, culturally and intellectually the heart of the Arab crescent from Morocco to Lebanon. An old saying in the region is that there can be no peace between Israel and her Arab neighbors without Syria, and no war without Egypt. It is still true today. No surprise that President Obama chose Cairo for his first major speech on relations between the U.S. and the Arab and Muslim world.

But now Obama confronts the ticklish task of encouraging change in Egypt without seeming to abandon the Mubarak government .  Egypt has served as a crucial counterweight to Syria and Iran. It has received tens of billions of dollars worth of U.S. aid over the years and carved out a cold but diplomatically important peace with Israel. As Egypt goes, so go Jordan and Saudi Arabia. The stakes are enormous.

FROM BAD TO WORSE….

FROM BAD TO WORSE…..

The thoroughly botched firing of Juan Williams as an analyst for NPR has claimed another victim, exposed management weaknesses within the organization and launched a much-needed review of NPR’s muddled non-policy for what its reporters and analysts can and cannot say on other media outlets.

The latest victim is Ellen Weiss, the respected senior vice president for news, who was forced to resign and take the fall. Weiss was the executive who fired Williams last October with a late-night phone call after he played into Bill O’Reilly’s hands by saying on Fox News that he became “nervous” whenever he boarded a plane with passengers dressed in “muslim garb.”  That gratuitous personal observation — feeding  O’Reilly’s ongoing tirade about Muslims — violated even NPR’s vague guidelines against its people expressing their opinions on controversial topics on other media outlets.  It was also the kind of racial and religious profiling that Williams rightly has long campaigned against when applied to African-Americans.  An independent review of the firing by an outside law firm concluded the obvious: i.e., that NPR was within its legal rights to dismiss Williams — and that the firing was “mishandled.”

No kidding. The controversy provoked an avalanche of protests from listeners and led to the latest Congressional move to cut funding for public broadcasting.  It also provided an opening to Roger Ailes, the Republican political operative who runs Fox News. He seized the moment to reward Williams with a new, $2 million contract as a full-timer at Fox.

The only good news in this whole mess, other than the boost to Williams’ bank balance, is that NPR has launched a serious review and revision of its ethics guidelines. That will presumably result in an overdue clarification of just what its people should and should not say when appearing on other outlets.

The answer is obvious: reporting, analysis and commentary are three distinctly different functions, whether in print or on the air.  The first states the news, the second analyzes its meaning  and the third expresses an opinion.  The first two are fine on NPR or any other outlet. The third is also fine, but must be clearly labeled as commentary by a commentator. NPR broadcasts commentary every day. I have contributed some such myself.  In this as in so many fields, sunshine is the best disinfectant.

Juan Williams, incidentally, was an NPR analyst, not a commentator. I am sure he understood the distinction, but he chose to blur the line during his Fox appearances.

It is now up to NPR to redraw the line as part of its ethics review — and enforce it.

CHANGE THE MESSAGE…

The announcement today that Robert Gibbs will be replaced as White House spokesman is evidence that President Obama has realized – finally – that he has to upgrade his message machine. The first step in changing the message is changing the messenger. But Obama himself will have to put more effort into communicating what he is doing and why he is doing it. In his post-election press conference, he acknowledged that that task had been neglected in his first two years and that he had paid a price for it. Hence, the famous “shellacking.”
One of the great mysteries of the first half of the Obama term is how one of the best communicators in politics failed to get his message across. We’ll see if that changes now.