just a quick note on media coverage: yesterday there was a lot of comment from egypt about the lack of coverage from al jazeera of the protests. this was in marked contrast to the extensive coverage given the tunisian protests/revolution. the speculative explanation is not surprising: people thought that the mubarak government had made a deal with that of qatar...
al jazeera is still not giving egypt much space, really---but there's more than there was yesterday.
there's little doubt that not only more centralized media forms are playing a basic role---decentralized media is pivotal.
this is an interesting piece that i just stumbled across...it's arguing that ben ali was a perfect client for the united states. so the imbrication between american foreign policy and repressive dictatorships is coming to the fore:
Ben Ali Tunisia was model US client - Opinion - Al Jazeera English
while all the blah blah blah about "freedom" from the empire turns to wood.
this could be a very complicated situation for us realpolitik...it should be interesting to watch this play out. you know, for the theater.
===================
btw---here's another blog compendium, from the ny times. it includes names of some of the bloggers/twitter accounts, links to a yfrog page with photos of tuesday's demos, and links to some youtube-hosted footage.
Egyptian Bloggers Report on New Unrest - NYTimes.com
====================
a mix of interesting stuff, rumor, chaos...#Jan25 on twitter....
Twitter / Search