The media is a mirror of the political environment

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Like many others, I have always considered CNN one of my primary sources of news and analysis. I have learned during my diplomatic work that reading any country requires looking at it from multiple windows, and the media is one of them. But the question I always ask is: To what extent does the image we see reflect the reality of the society we are looking at?

Over time, I began to feel that some programs, especially evening programs, were losing some of the balance that media of this stature should have, and I worried that they would present foreign viewers with an image of the United States that did not necessarily reflect the diversity of its society. I decided to test this impression with numbers.

I watched five days of an evening opinion show, with a total of twenty guest seats. Diversity in origins and gender was clearly present. Indeed, blacks and Hispanic Americans, who together constitute about a third of the population, occupied half the seats, that is, more than their percentage of the population, although my first impression that they constituted the majority was exaggerated, as often happens when we rely on impressions alone. However, appearance is not the primary issue. A committee may appear diverse in the backgrounds of its members while in fact speaking with one voice. Republicans or Trump supporters held only five seats, and the number of right-wing representatives, if we add conservatives who oppose the president, reached nine seats, compared to ten for the left and one neutral seat. In most episodes, the pro-Trump guest was sitting alone among a number of his opponents, and two of them interrupted him at the same time on more than one occasion.

In a discussion about violence against immigration officers, a guest was bombarded with numbers before he could finish his speech, and then the presenter himself joined in rather than just moderating the discussion. The objection directed at him was indeed worthy of discussion, as the German sociologist Max Weber argued that the state monopolizes the legitimate use of force within its territory, and thus the use of force by public authorities is subject to stricter standards than those by which the violence of individuals is judged. But the interviewee also had a response worth hearing, which is that scrutiny of the use of force under the law is not inconsistent with concern for individual violence. The viewer had the right to hear his entire argument before judging it.

A daytime program on the same network provides a useful comparison, as it also included twenty seats, had an almost equal number of Republican and Democratic strategists, talk time was distributed almost equally, and the broadcaster was keen to organize the exchange of turns. The network is the same and the backgrounds are similar, but the experience is different, and the difference is not in the people but in the design of the program. I realize that these observations come from two programs in two weeks, they indicate a pattern that deserves attention and do not prove a general rule, and I am not indicting the network or television as a medium.

Polarization is a deep feature of American politics, which President Trump has intensified but not created. All institutions of society have adapted to it, from news channels to Congress and universities, and even families around the dinner table. Television began to provide each camp with what it wanted to watch because the political division preceded the division of the media audience.

If we leave the American screen to our environment, we find that the comparison between the two cases is what really concerns me here. The United States can absorb much of its polarization because it has institutional outlets for its expression: biennial elections, independent courts, broad mandates, an omnidirectional press, and the right to demonstrate. Some of its programs may be unbalanced, but the other party has its own channels from which it receives. The clamor we see on screen reflects a society that is arguing with itself, but which has the institutions and spaces in which it continues this debate.

In Egypt, the gap is closer to the distance between an official speech and an audience that no longer trusts it to the same extent. Many well-known broadcasters repeat this speech with great enthusiasm and with a limited amount of diversity in delivery, to the point that many viewers, especially young people, have begun to doubt what they are saying before they listen to it. The result is not persuasion but backlash. I do not think that the problem begins with the broadcasters themselves. In my opinion, they are responding to a political environment in which serious opposition does not find a sufficient place in parliament, the press, or the street. When society does not find a legitimate place for disagreement, disagreement does not disappear but rather looks for other outlets.

The most important of these outlets is social media, which may be a necessary outlet for grievances and opinions that cannot be heard, but they have no clear rules for discussion and no reliable mechanisms for verification, so the correct opinion is mixed with false claims, and the real grievance is mixed with exaggeration or deliberate manipulation. It is then difficult to distinguish between legitimate criticism and misleading information.

The state itself bears the cost of this situation. Restricting dissenting narratives may seem like a way to protect their power, but it deprives them of an important source of understanding what really concerns citizens, and makes correcting mistakes, explaining difficult decisions, and redressing grievances more complicated.

Credibility is not imposed by a decision or gained by declaring loyalty. Rather, it is built over time and quickly lost when loyalty becomes more important than convincing people. Criticism that is based on facts does not necessarily represent a threat to stability, but rather may be one of the reasons for maintaining it. When spaces for expression narrow, disagreement does not disappear, but rather moves to spaces where it becomes more angry and less amenable to responsible discussion.

Therefore, the issue in essence is not related to CNN or Egyptian television alone, but rather to the relationship between the media and the political environment within which it operates. The American media reflects a system in which the voice of disagreement is loud but allows it multiple spaces for expression, and the viewer abroad should understand that what he sees in an American committee is an aspect of a divided society and not a complete map of public opinion. In our case, the narrowness of these spaces has a price that must be paid first and foremost by credibility.

Perhaps we at home should honestly ask: What does our media tell us about the political environment in which we live? And what cannot it say?

Quoted from “Al-Masry Al-Youm”