Much of the Western media persists in describing Mohamed Morsi's ouster as president as a military coup regardless of the fact that tens of millions of Egyptians took to the streets across Egypt on 30 June and 3 July to demand early presidential elections which Morsi refused. Official bodies, from the governments of the US and UK to the UN and EU, have been more cautious, issuing statements that talk of military intervention rather than a coup and urging the speedy transfer of power to an elected civilian authority. The Muslim Brotherhood has no such qualms. It immediately dubbed the military's moves against Morsi as a coup and has urged its members to rise up in support of the deposed president. Its characterisation was happily adopted by CNN which has covered the events under the headline “Coup in Egypt: Military ousts Morsi”. Opponents of the former president refuse the description. “It's a revolution, not a coup,” insists Obama Supports Terrorism in Egypt, a Facebook page launched on Friday which already has 35,000 subscribers. On Twitter the hash-tag CNN_STOP_Lying_About_Egypt is trending. “The media reports the news. It is not its job to judge what happens in Egypt and describe it as a coup,” says Daily News news editor Sara Abu Bakr. “It seems the Western media, in particular the American media, decided that it knows better than the millions of angry anti-Morsi protesters.” In an attempt to balance its coverage CNN has hosted opposition leaders like Mohamed Al-Baradei, asking them to explain how the army's eviction of a democratically elected president can be a revolution rather than a coup. “When you end up with 20 million people in the street, of the state of mind that he needs to go and he needs to go now, it's a sad state,” said Al-Baradei. “Either we risk a civil war or take extra constitutional measures to ensure that we keep the country together.” Morsi's supporters, outraged at his ouster, immediately took to the streets of Cairo and other cities carrying pictures of the president and demanding his release from house arrest and reinstatement. Some television networks in the US — Fox news, CBS, ABC and MSNBC among them — have avoided using the word coup. In the main they have restricted their coverage of events in Egypt to a few minutes each day. Lacking their own reporters on the ground they are largely dependent on news agencies. US print media also seems to have fallen into two camps. In an editorial The Washington Post stated clearly that the army's ousting of Morsi constituted a military coup while The New York Times has opted for the less loaded military intervention. The three main news agencies Agence France Press, Reuters and the Associated Press have resolutely avoided describing last week's events as either a revolution or military coup in their ongoing coverage. European media outlets and TV networks are equally ambivalent. Sky News, whose Cairo-based reporter has provided intensive coverage since the pre-June 30 Revolution till now, prefers the phrase military intervention. The channel was unusual in devoting so much time to the mass protests against Morsi, and remains so in its coverage of violence perpetrated by the ousted president's supporters. But, it was not only the Western media that came under fire. Al-Jazeera Egypt channel also was blamed for being biased to the Muslim Brotherhood as it only focuses in its coverage on the pro-Morsi supporters in Rabaa Al-Adawiya, ignoring anti-Morsi protesters in Tahrir. The concern about Al-Jazeera's neutrality was echoed when 22 of its employees including anchors and reporters announced their resignation because of Al-Jazeera's editorial policy, and the way it covered events in Egypt. Journalists said that they were instructed to favour the Brotherhood since the beginning of the 30 June protests. Haggag Salama, who worked as their correspondent, resigned accusing Al-Jazeera of “airing lies and misleading viewers”. While Al-Jazeera anchor Karem Mahmoud said he left because of the channel's editorial line over recent events in Egypt. “I felt that there were errors in the way the coverage was done, especially that now in Egypt we are going through a critical phase that requires a lot of auditing in terms of what gets broadcast,” Mahmoud told Al-Arabiya news channel. The failure of much of the Western media to offer in-depth coverage of the 30 June Revolution has raised concerns about how the West views the Arab Spring. Carina Kamal, a media expert based in London, says the Western media has failed to convey a nuanced picture of what Egyptians are experiencing. “Western editors have been trying to fit events into their own narrow, outdated and ill-informed narrative,” she argued in an analysis published by US electronic outlet Huffington Post. With hours left before the army's ultimatum ended, she writes, “major Western broadcasters flew in their star anchors to report from the iconic Tahrir square, and still they struggled to express the depth and dimensions of unfolding events.” Khaled Shaalan, from London's School of African and Oriental Studies, attributes the Western media's failure to accurately cover events in Egypt to an unwillingness to acknowledge the power of the Egyptian people in shaping their own destiny. “The failure of Western media and pundits to both recognise and project the nuances of the current conflict in Egypt through their negligence of people's agency in shaping the political outcomes is both pathetic and shameful,” he said. It is “pathetic” because it indicates the degree to which Western intellectual circles remain “willfully entrapped in an outdated and out-of-touch Orientalist worldview of the region”. The media, he argued, was sending a message to Western audiences that while the “protests might look noble and impressive the only real political players in Egypt are military generals and Islamists”. Egyptian commentator Tarek Heggi has written to 500 foreign journalists based in Cairo pointing out that if Morsi was democratically elected, then so too were both Adolf Hitler and Ismail Haniyeh of Palestine. “I understand that people unfamiliar with the Middle East may believe that the Muslim Brothers are a political movement that accepts democracy. Those who know the region, however, are fully aware that Islamism and democracy are 100 per cent foes,” reads Heggi's letter.
