Apparently those looking for updates about the revolution in Tunisia via mainstream media were largely out of luck, according to Amy Goodman and her guest today on Democracy Now!, University of Michigan professor of history Juan Cole.
In recent days, Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali has been ousted and sent into exile in Saudi Arabia, following more than four weeks of protests throughout the country over food prices, unemployment and government repression. Just last week, the protests spread to Tunis, the relatively wealthy capitol city. Many Tunisians are calling for him to be extradited back to Tunisia to be tried.
The French media and Facebook had the US beat on coverage of what is the first popular revolution in the middle-east in decades, since the 1979 revolution in Iran. Said Cole, “But the American corporate news just blew off this story. They’re not interested in it. They don’t seem to think it’s important. Or maybe they’re a little bit afraid of it, because it is, after all, a revolution made by workers, and American corporate media are a little nervous about things like that.”
Nervous, indeed. Especially given the sudden recent focus on inflammatory speech, violence and calls for ‘action’ in American media these days, that nervousness makes sense. But it’s really no excuse to ignore an important world event. One reason Cole mentions for the lack of interest in this country is that the Tunisian revolution is not one fueled by Muslims. Were that the case, the so-called War on Terror would be invoked, stoking the rampant fear of Islam in America. Instead, as Cole remarks, “since it was a labor revolution and an internet activist revolution, it wasn’t seen as connected in any way to the master narrative of American foreign policy, which is now the—still the war on terror, even though they don’t call it that.”