An Open Letter to Christiane Amanpour and ABC News

This letter concerns your decision to interview Hosni Mubarak and Omar Suleiman in the context of Egypt’s unfolding revolution.

By today, February 7th, ABC News viewers may know that an estimated 300 people have been killed, more than 1,500 have been injured, and more than 600 have been detained by police, security, military, and plain clothes agents since the beginning of the Egyptian revolution on January 25th. In spite of the violence they face, people continue to put their lives on hold to make the impossible a reality – in so many cases because they have nothing left. Throughout the country, demonstrators proclaim they would rather risk death than continue to live under the dehumanizing conditions of the Mubarak regime.

What ABC News viewers may not know, however, is that the very people covering the bulk of these events – bloggers, journalists, photographers on the ground, as well as tweeting and blogging demonstrators themselves – have been increasingly targeted by the regime in recent days. Assaults, detentions, threats, restricted access, and confiscations of equipment have become an integral part of Mubarak’s propaganda campaign, accompanied by such theatrics as the unleashing of thousands of mercenary beltagiya on horses and camels. Though February 3rd was the day of attacks on personnel from dozens of news agencies, and though ABC News itself even noted these attacks on its website, your interview with Mubarak that same day did not give even a cursory mention of the press clampdown.

Was it out of concern for ratings and revenue, or a failure to understand that Mubarak continues to threaten Egyptians, that ABC News then announced your “exclusive” interview with the chief beneficiary of this violent anti-press campaign? Instead of holding Mubarak accountable for the violence of hired thugs and state agents, your interview granted him another chance to portray himself to the US and the world as a bulwark against chaos. The annexation of your program by NDP’s propaganda campaign became painfully obvious when you tweeted about chaos on Mubarak’s behalf. You then went on to interview Egypt’s new Vice President, Omar Suleiman, the renounced former head of the blood-spattered Mukhabarat, in another “exclusive” on February 6th. And again, looking past the street-level reporters who would never be granted the dubious privilege of interviewing Suleiman, you did not question him about the regime’s press clampdown.

But Mubarak and Suleiman are not the story here, Ms. Amanpour. Rather, the story is the revolution to depose NDP rule. It is the end of a decades-long slumber and the rediscovery of imaginative reserves of hope.