Mullings An American Cyber Column By Rich Galen

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Outside the Frame

Rich Galen

Friday February 11, 2011

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Here's what I typically watch all day: Law & Order and/or NCIS reruns depending upon what USA Network is serving up. If it's Monk reruns, I'll watch whatever's on Turner Classic Movies.

Yesterday, though, I was glued to CNN whose talent assured me that any minute now the President of Egypt was going to announce that the protesters had gotten their way and he was stepping down.

For hours. HOURS. I watched studio hosts, Skype reporters, CNN stringers, and Obama Administration experts (like the Director of Central Intelligence, Leon Panetta) tell us about how Hosni was going to take his billions in ill-gotten gains and height off to Switzerland or Germany or Bahrain or somewhere else and live out his days as a Phormer Pharaoh should.

Finally, at after 10 PM Cairo time, Mubarak stepped before the microphones and, as the U.K. Telegraph put it:

The expectation was that Mr Mubarak would leave office. But in a long statement the president only ceded some, unspecified, control to his vice-president and repeated that he would remain in his post until elections could be organised in September.

Oops.

Turns out the only guy who got it right - in the whole, entire world - was the Information Minister of Egypt who said Mubarak was not going to resign which was poo-pooed in the same way that Baghdad Bob was when he refused to admit there were any Americans at the airport.

CNN's Anderson Cooper was so distraught that he had to be put in a CNN time out.

Here's one of the big problems in modern news coverage: We have no way of knowing what is going out three inches or three thousand miles outside the frame of the television camera.

We spent the day being treated to the often hyperventilated coverage of what had been going on in Tahrir Square. Let's say there were 100,000 people there on Thursday.

Egypt is a country of 80 million. We have no idea what the other 79,900,000 people were doing because they are outside the frame.

I am in favor of democracy. I think people should have the right to decide how much responsibility - or how little - they want to take for their own governance.

In the U.S. we want a lot of responsibility.

But, not every nation wants the authority to "throw the rascals out" as we do. That's ok. So long as they get to decide they want to cede that power to, say, a royal family.

I have no idea what is going to happen in Egypt. Nor in the rest of North Africa.

But I do know that the geniuses at CNN or MSNBC or FOX or at the Department of State or even at the CIA are no better at guessing the future in that region than I am.

Difference is � I admit I have no clue.

Mubarak may believe he can wait the demonstrators out. It might be that he has a better view of his country than I do sitting in my den in Old Town Alexandria, VA.

If I had been advising Mubarak, I would have counseled against giving that speech on a Thursday night. Why? Because in the Muslim world Friday is like Sunday is to Christians - the holy day.

And, like most Christians, the holy day is a day off so in Egypt the masses will have nothing better to do than to raise Cain about Mubarak's refusal to exit stage right.

I have been giving Obama a pass on how the Administration has handled the past two weeks in Egypt.

No more.

It is one thing to have been surprised by the speed and magnitude of the anti-Mubarak demonstrations in Egypt. But, after more than two weeks I would have thought the CIA and other intelligence services would have been able to determine what President Mubarak was going to do (or not do) yesterday.

In his speech in Michigan yesterday President Obama all but offered Mubarak a room in the White House until he decided where he wanted to settle down.

How embarrassing for the President of the United States to be so disconnected to the major event on the planet.

Apparently it is not just the Western world which was befuddled by what is outside the frame of the TV cameras - the Obama administration was just as befuddled as we were.

Yikes.

On the Secret Decoder Ring today: The link to the U.K. Telegraph piece on Egypt. Also a wholly unrelated Mullfoto and a Catchy Caption of the day.

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