http://lynch.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/01/12/where_are_the_democracy_promoters_on_tunisia
Barely a month goes by without a
Washington Post editorial
bemoaning Egypt's authoritarian retrenchment and criticizing the Obama administration's alleged failure to promote Arab democracy. But now Tunisia has erupted as
the story of the year for Arab reformers. The spiraling protests and the regime's heavy-handed, but thus far ineffective, repression have captured the imagination of Arab publics, governments, and political analysts. Despite Tunis's efforts to censor media coverage, images and video have made it out onto social media and up to Al Jazeera and other satellite TV. The "Tunisia scenario" is now the term of art for activist hopes and government fears of political instability and mass protests from Jordan to Egypt to the Gulf.
But the
Post's op-ed page has been
strikingly silent about the Tunisian protests. Thus far, a month into the massive demonstrations rocking Tunisia, the
Washington Post editorial page has published exactly
zero editorials about Tunisia. For that matter, the
Weekly Standard, another magazine which frequently claims the mantle of Arab democracy and attacks Obama for failing on it, has thus far published exactly
zero articles about Tunisia (though, to his credit, frequent
Standard contributor and ex-Bush administration official Elliott Abrams has
weighed in on it at his new CFR blog). Why are the most prominent media voices on Arab democracy so entirely absent on the Arab reform story of the year?
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