In Columbia Journalism Review, October 2, 2012:

Occupiers face off with police in New York's Union Square. Photo: Jared Malsin, March 2012

With the nation’s political media gripped by electoral fever in the run up to the presidential election, perhaps now is a good moment to pause and note that two of the most important forces that have shaped American political discourse over the last four years have been not parties or candidates, but political movements that emerged from outside the political system, namely the Tea Party and the Occupy movement.

The particular challenges of covering these two movements was the subject of a symposium at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism on Monday night, moderated by Todd Gitlin, the author of a new book about Occupy.

While no attempt was made to equate the two movements, which hail from opposite ends of the political spectrum, the driving idea behind the panel was that political movements—as opposed to candidates, elections, and governments—require a different journalistic approach: They demand deep, constant immersion to fully understand.

Or at least that is Gitlin’s view. “Movements are strange, and if you don’t have a feel, or openness to something that is sui generis and view it as a mob or a failed political party or a failed organization or something, then you’re going to miss it,” he told CJR in an interview following the symposium.

Gitlin argues that this deep approach can succeed in capturing the nature of a movement under certain conditions. “Immersion will teach you a lot if you just keep your eyes and ears open, but for sure it’s a necessary condition that you decide going in that when you look at a movement, you’re not going to judge it by whether it’s an organization. It isn’t an organization, and if you view a giraffe as a failed elephant, you’re not going to have much to say about giraffes.”

Aside from Gitlin, the diverse panel included five journalists and one author of an academic study on the Tea Party movement who have, in very different ways, reported these movements as he suggests, not by dropping in occasionally on a meeting here or a protest there, but by immersing themselves and exploring them deeply and thoughtfully.

Continue reading at CJR

In Columbia Journalism Review, August 14, 2012:

Egyptian journos wary of recent government action

Blank columns appear in Egyptian newspapers to protest government actions, August 9, 2012. Photo: Jared Malsin

Egyptian journalists are outraged over a pair of government decisions last week which they say curb media freedom and independence.

In the first of the two moves, the upper house of Egypt’s parliament, under the control of the Muslim Brotherhood, appointed new editors of the state-owned newspapers, sparking outrage among journalists opposed to both the appointment process and the selection of figures seen as unqualified for chief editor posts.

Angered over the appointments, journalists at several privately-owned papers, which were not affected by the appointments, ran blank spaces in place of their columns on August 9 in solidarity with their colleagues in the state-owned press.

Then, on Saturday, a court ordered the confiscation the day’s edition of Ad-Dustournewspaper after it ran a rambling front-page editorial denouncing Brotherhood-affiliated president Mohamed Morsi for “fascism” and calling on the army to “defend the civil state.”

But both incidents were swept out of the headlines by Morsi’s stunning announcement on Sunday that he removed key generals, including defense minister Hussein Tantawi, from positions of power in the government. The preceding week’s skirmish over the newspapers joins the removal of generals in the ongoing battle for control of major institutions in Egypt in the wake of last year’s uprising that toppled former president Hosni Mubarak, of which the struggles over the role of the military and the drafting of the constitution are the most consequential.

For the journalists employed by the state-owned newspapers, last week’s appointments were the latest blow in a struggle for independence that dates back at least to the three-decade Mubarak era. Newspapers were nationalized under former president Gamal Abdel Nasser, creating a system in which the ruling party selected editors of state newspapers. That led to a system where editor appointments were political rather than based on journalistic experience. Appointments today are effectively controlled by the upper house of parliament, which is dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party.

But many journalists at state media would like to see the properties managed on the so-called BBC model, in which publicly owned institutions retain complete independence in editorial matters.

“We have long fought for such independence. They’re getting us back to square one,” said Yehia Ghanem, a senior journalist and editor at the flagship daily Al-Ahram. “That’s why the majority of journalists are very much opposed to the way those appointments have been handed down.”

Sitting in a cloud of cigarette smoke behind his desk in a grey-walled office adjoining Al-Ahram’s downtown Cairo newsroom, Ghanem said he does not challenge the legal power of the upper house of parliament, also called the Shura Council, to appoint editors, although he, like other journalists, objected to the fact that the process was overseen by politicians, not professional journalists.

Continue reading at CJR

In Columbia Journalism Review, August 10, 2012:

Armed assailants killed 16 Egyptian soldiers waiting to break the day’s Ramadan fast in the Sinai Peninsula on Sunday. The unidentified attackers proceeded to steal two military vehicles, which they used to breach the Israeli border before being thwarted by an Israeli airstrike. Eight attackers were reportedly killed during the incident. The attack raised the stakes in an ongoing battle for security in the Sinai Peninsula, a rugged, sparsely populated, politically neglected region where Bedouin groups sometimes exert as much control as the Egyptian military, which itself is prohibited by the 1979 peace treaty with Israel from deploying sufficient troops in the area.

But the attack also underlined how little information is widely available—particularly in the non-Arabic press—about the Sinai, which is emerging as a burning political and security issue. The night of the initial attack, Egyptian and international television networks were forced to rely on a trickle of information from state news outlets as well as phone interviews with the few Egyptian journalists based in the Sinai.

By Wednesday morning, the sense of confusion only deepened when news leaked of an Egyptian military operation in north Sinai, which one official claimed killed 20 people. But an Al Jazeera English reporter on the scene reported that no bodies were found in the morgues and no one was reported missing from the towns where the operation reportedly took place. Back in Cairo, a brief statement from the military, read on television by a stern, disembodied voice, confirmed that an operation took place but gave few details.

Of course, a degree of confusion is to be expected whenever news of a sensitive security matter breaks in a remote region. But the ongoing crisis in the Sinai demands deep reporting on the economic, military, and political dynamics at the root of the instability. International journalists said that such reporting is difficult to carry out because of access restrictions applied by the Egyptian authorities along with increasing concerns for personal safety in a region where foreigners, Americans in particular, have recently been targeted for kidnapping. Police all but disappeared from the Sinai after heavily armed Bedouin routed them in fighting during the winter 2011 uprising that ended the dictatorship of former president Hosni Mubarak.

“I wouldn’t feel safe for more than a few days unless I was staying in one place with people I trust,” said GlobalPost senior Middle East correspondent Erin Cunningham. “Which is how I conducted my interviews in Kandahar, in Afghanistan.”

Continue reading at CJR.

In Columbia Journalism Review, July 25, 2012:

The Muslim Brotherhood’s post-uprising TV station

A newscaster hosts a call-in show on Muslim Brotherhood-backed channel Misr25. Photo: Jared Malsin, June 2012

CAIRO, EGYPT — The Muslim Brotherhood’s year-old television station, Misr25, broadcasts from a building in Egypt’s Media Production City, a vast complex of buildings built under former president Hosni Mubarak in the desert west of Cairo, well beyond the pyramids. The compound is home to dozens of production studios, including those of Misr25’s direct competitors in Egyptian television.

A red vinyl banner hangs on the concrete exterior of Studio 15, announcing the station’s presence. On the banner, Mohamed Morsi, the Brotherhood candidate who won the presidency in June, smiles and extends his hands in welcome. During a visit last week, technicians, producers, and journalists crowded past each other in the building’s narrow corridors. In the studio, the host of a talk show titled People’s Opinion was discussing “freedom, justice, and renaissance” in Egyptian society, in between taking viewers’ calls. On the other side of the room, outside the camera’s gaze, a designer was arranging a kitchen set, apparently for a cooking show.

The number 25 in the station’s name is a reference to January 25, 2011, the start date of the 18-day popular uprising that ended Mubarak’s 30-year dictatorship. The channel owes its existence to the uprising, which also ended the Mubarak regime’s grip on Egyptian broadcast media. As a banned opposition group under the old regime, the Brotherhood was prohibited from spreading its message of Islamic reform on the airwaves.

In Misr25’s small, fluorescent-lit newsroom, earnest journalists insist that the channel’s news reporting is independent, but their concept of independence includes advancing the Brotherhood’s political project. The group’s stated aim is to reform society and the state based on Islam, although Brotherhood leaders have insisted recently that legislation should be based only on an Islamic “frame of reference” and not on full implementation of Islamic religious law.

“We support the Brotherhood’s Islamic project, the brotherhood’s civilizational project, not by privileging something other than fact,” said Yasser Ad-Dokani, the station’s news director. “We are capable of being balanced, but we do not deny our relationship or our connection with the Brotherhood.” Ad-Dokani, like many of the new channel’s journalists, is not a member of the Brotherhood, though he says he supports the organization’s aims. He was a 10-year employee of state television before he joined Misr25.

Continue reading at CJR

This is a long story that I co-reported and wrote with Ramallah-based reporter Joseph Dana, published on the cover of the The National newspaper’s weekend magazine on July 21, 2012:

Regime change in Egypt further tangles political ties with Israel

Late last August, the aftershocks of the Egyptian uprising reached the Israeli Embassy in Cairo. Urged on by a crowd of demonstrators angered over Israel’s killing of several Egyptian soldiers on the Sinai border after militants had carried out a bold attack inside Israel, Ahmed Al Shehat scaled the 22-storey building in Cairo’s Giza neighbourhood and snatched the Israeli flag down, replacing it with Egypt’s.

Three weeks after the so-called “flagman” incident, protesters marched from Tahrir Square to the embassy, tearing down a concrete security wall. After clashing all night with police amid a haze of tear gas, demonstrators stormed the embassy, seizing classified documents and flinging them from the windows. As this drama was unfolding in Cairo, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, convened his security cabinet in Jerusalem and anxiously awaited information on the fate of the embassy’s stricken staff.

These protests were sparked by a chain of events that had begun with a pair of routine but deadly Israeli attacks in Gaza. Two days after those strikes, Egyptian gunmen launched a three-pronged attack using Kalashnikovs and a roadside bomb near the Red Sea resort town of Eilat, killing six civilians and one soldier. Israeli forces pursued the attackers across the Egyptian border, killing several soldiers in the process. Three nights of Israeli air raids on Gaza, killing 14 Palestinians, followed this cross-border violence. Further stoking Egyptian anger, Israeli defence minister Ehud Barak refused to apologise for the deaths.

The ransacking of the embassy, one of only two that Israel maintains in the Arab world, was a stark illustration of a new political reality: Israel could no longer rely on its stalwart ally, the ousted former president Hosni Mubarak, to suppress Egyptian opposition to Israeli military action in Gaza, in the Sinai or elsewhere.

Any overreaching by Israel risked the safety of its diplomatic staff and the stability of its diplomatic position in Egypt, Israel’s largest and most important neighbour. Political instability in Egypt, coupled with a deepening sense of isolation in Israel, creates a situation in which radical posturing can be used for cheap political gain. The flagman episode aside, both governments will respect the peace treaty between the two, but resentment of Israel will remain a fixture of Egyptian political reality, while fear will continue to dominate the discourse in Israel. Several officials confirmed the embassy protests marked a turning point. Egypt’s former ambassador to Washington, Abdel Raouf El Reedy, said in an interview in his high-rise overlooking the Nile: “I think the Israelis are going to be more careful about shooting, because it demonstrated that it could grow into a big problem for both sides. And it cannot be guaranteed that they [Egyptians] will be controlled. It was a lesson.”

Through conversations with the generals, ambassadors, secret policemen and intellectuals who have been at the crossroads of this uneasy marriage between Egypt and Israel for the last 30 years, a picture emerged of a relationship built on steady foundations despite the shift in dynamics and the overheated rhetoric emerging from the mainstream press in both countries. Contrary to dire predictions from some Israeli officials as well as right-wing commentators in the United States playing on fears of a hardline Islamist administration in Egypt, the country’s newly elected president, Mohamed Morsi, will not withdraw from the peace treaty with Israel, nor can he afford to curtail security cooperation, given the two countries’ mutual interest in maintaining calm along their shared border. The question now is whether Israel’s leaders understand that while the treaty is safe, their military options have changed.

Continue reading this story at The National

My story for Columbia Journalism Review, July 18, 2012:

In Egypt, new newspapers and old problems

CAIRO, EGYPT — Egyptian newsstands today offer a lively range of options, including three government-owned papers, papers affiliated with political parties, and several privately-owned papers, some of which sprung up since the 2011 uprising that toppled President Hosni Mubarak. Since only 30 percent of Egyptians have access to the Internet, according to 2011 figures, newspapers, along with television and radio, are likely to continue playing a key role in Egyptian media for years.

Although overt government censorship was ousted along with Mubarak, Egypt’s burgeoning independent press is facing a new and more complex set of challenges. A lack of government transparency coupled with questions about the political and business interests controlling privately owned newspapers are adding to public skepticism of the mainstream press at the precise moment journalists are needed to cover the country’s difficult, delicate transition from military to civilian rule.

“We are moving from state ownership to oligarch ownership,” Hisham Kassem, a veteran of the independent press here, said in an interview in his apartment steps from Tahrir Square in downtown Cairo. “In Egypt, the newspaper is owned by an individual who has nothing to do with the profession, but is there for the influence.”

Kassem, who in the 1990s founded the independent but now-defunct Cairo Times and later published the pioneering independent newspaper Al-Masry Al-Youm, is in the midst of launching a new cross-platform media company called Algomhouria Algadida (which translates as “The New Republic,” though it has no relation to the Washington, DC-based magazine, he said).

However, Kassem’s project remains, for the moment, in a holding pattern while he waits for jumpy investors to feel assured that the political situation in Egypt has stabilized. He recently had cable laid in an empty newsroom that he hopes will, by the end of the year, produce high-quality content for a newspaper, website, television station, and radio station.

Kassem says he plans to establish total editorial independence by insuring that no one investor will control more than 10 percent of the company.

This business model is an attempt to confront an existing problem of so-called “anchor investors,” usually business figures, often with connections to the old regime, who own controlling stakes in key news organizations. According to a recent report produced for the Ford Foundation, these investors treat the mainstream media “as pseudo-empires, fundamentally influencing public opinion.”

Continue reading this story at CJR.

My report on the Egyptian presidential election, in May, for Alternet, May 24, 2012:

This is an investigative story I wrote on The Hebron Fund, a Brooklyn-based nonprofit organization that raises funds for militant Israeli settlers in the West Bank city of Hebron. It was published in Salon on December 14, 2011:

New York charity abets Israeli settler violence

Israeli soldiers staff a checkpoint in the Old City of Hebron. Photo: Jared Malsin, May 2009

On the June 18, 2007, a nonprofit organization called the Hebron Fund held a fundraiser on a cruise ship in the Hudson River to support Israel settlers’ occupation of a Palestinian house in the West Bank city of Hebron. Some 250 people paid a minimum of $65 each for the “Cruise ‘n’ Schmooze.”  The proceeds went to support the settler who had taken the property from the Rajabi family, who denied the settlers’ claims that they had legally purchased the home.

A year and half later, Israeli police using stun grenades carried out a government order to evacuate a group of some 100 settlers hunkered down in the four-story hilltop. The house had become the center of a crisis when the Israeli government ruled that the building had been illegally seized from the Rajabi family, and ordered the settlers out.

Once evicted, the settlers commenced a rampage that lasted several hours, setting fire to Palestinian houses, olive trees and cars. Twenty-five people were wounded, including a man in critical condition after a settler shot him at close range. A Palestinian Red Crescent official told U.S. Consulate officials that during the riots, settlers stopped an ambulance and defaced the ambulance, painting “let the Arabs die” and covering the red crescent symbol with the Star of David.

The Hebron Fund is just one of more than 40 organizations that have raised some $200 million over a decade in tax-exempt donations for Israel’s West Bank settlements, a project that places them in violation of U.S. foreign policy and international law.

U.S. presidents from both parties have opposed settlements in occupied Palestinian territory since Israel seized the West Bank and Gaza in 1967. Early in his administration, President Obama made settlement expansion a centerpiece of his now-defunct push to renew negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

The State Department reiterated this policy last June, saying in astatement, “Like every American administration for decades, we do not accept the legitimacy of continued settlement activity.”

Despite official opposition to the settlement enterprise from the White House and State Department, the U.S. Treasury gives tax breaks to groups whose sole purpose is to raise funds for the settlements. These groups have collectively raised more than $200 million over 10 years.

I was arrested while covering the police raid on the Occupy Wall Street encampment at New York’s Zuccotti Park on November 15. Several other journalists were also arrested while covering the days events, highlighting the challenges faced by reporters who deal with New York police.

I videotaped my own arrest and reported on the incident for The New York Times blog The Local East Village:

The police arrested some 200 people, including this reporter, in and around the Occupy Wall Street encampment in Lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park early Tuesday.

While some officers, many in riot gear, moved into the park, others blocked access to the park within a one- to two-block radius, also closing subway stations in the area as well as access to the Brooklyn Bridge.

At around 1:45 a.m., finding all routes to the park blocked, this reporter filmed scuffles between the police and a crowd of more than 100 demonstrators near the intersection of Broadway and Cortlandt Street, about one block north of Zuccotti Park. As shown in the video above, protesters chanted “Shame!” and “This is a peaceful protest!” while occasionally jostling with police.

Less than 15 minutes later, an officer speaking through a bullhorn ordered the demonstrators to leave the area, while a line of police in riot gear slowly pushed the crowd northward along Broadway’s western sidewalk. This reporter tweeted from the scene: “I am one block north of the park and can’t leave. Crowd on sidewalk literally surrounded by police.”

The Local’s reporter, who repeatedly identified himself to the police as a journalist while on the scene, complied with the order and walked north while filming protesters, however (as seen at the 2:11 mark in the video) his progress was stopped by a group of officers blocking the sidewalk at the intersection of Broadway and John Street. One of the officers arrested him using plastic Flexi-Cuffs, even as he continued to identify himself as a journalist and called attention to press credentials hanging from his neck. (The press card had been issued for an unrelated assignment by the Media Accreditation and Liaison Unit of the United Nations in September).

The Local’s reporter was put onboard a police van with eight other arrestees, including two New School undergraduates, a photographer with Agance France Presse, and city councilman Ydanis Rodriguez, all handcuffed behind their backs. Mr. Rodriguez had blood on his temple from what he said was an earlier confrontation with the police. He recalled previous demonstrations, including the occupation of a City College administration building in the early 1990s.

The van arrived at One Police Plaza at around 3:20 a.m., where the arrestees were placed in holding cells. Over the course of the night some 60 other men were remanded to the men’s communal cell, a concrete room separated by bulletproof glass from a police work area.

This reporter was released at 9:35 a.m. and charged with disorderly conduct, which in New York is a “violation,” a step below a misdemeanor.

Most of the demonstrators held at One Police Plaza were charged with the same violation, while others were also accused of resisting arrest. At least two said they were charged with jaywalking after being arrested crossing the street.

According to City Room’s live blog of the Zuccotti Park clearing, at least five other journalists were reportedly arrested while covering ongoing Occupy Wall Street protests. Those arrested included a reporter and a photographer from The Associated Press, a reporter from The Daily News, a photographer from DNA Info, and a freelance reporter for National Public Radio. The Times’s Media Decoder blog reported that other journalists, in what some have called a “media blackout,” complained that they were not allowed access to areas around Zuccotti Park. Gothamist and Huffington Post also noted the seeming crackdown on media coverage.

Today at 11:57 a.m., Matthew Lysiak, a reporter for The Daily News, wrote on that outlet’s live blog that he was arrested while covering a demonstration at a park at Sixth Avenue and Grand Street. At 12:34 p.m., he posted an update indicating that he was on a police bus with two other reporters.

My report and video from the near-eviction of the Occupy Wall Street New York encampment on October 14 appeared on the New York Times Local East Village site. Here’s the video and an excerpt from the post:

A feared confrontation between the police and Occupy Wall Street protesters was averted this morning after the company that owns Zuccotti Park postponed a planned cleaning of the plaza.

The morning was not without incident, as a smaller group of several hundred protesters announced their intention to “celebrate” their continued occupation of the park with an unpermitted civil disobedience march through the streets of the Financial District. The group pushed through a police line onto Broadway chanting “Whose streets? Our Streets!” Police on foot and riding motor scooters forced the protesters back onto the sidewalk, only to have the demonstrators spill again into the streets.

As The Local’s cameras rolled, one man fell to the ground screaming after a police scooter moved into a cluster of people. The man was struck with a baton and arrested moments later as witnesses called out, “You ran over his foot” and chanted, “The whole world is watching.” One bystander hurled a bag of trash at police officers as they pushed protestors back onto the sidewalk.

Writer Michael Tracey, who tweeted that he was punched in the shoulder by a detective, reported that a member of the National Lawyers Guild had his foot run over (it is unclear whether the tweet refers to the same incident), and Miles Doran, a journalist with CBS News, tweeted that his foot was also run over: “This happened several times. Some protester’s feet, legs run over by scooters.”

Thousands of demonstrators had converged on the three-quarter acre park before sunrise Friday, fearing police would evict demonstrators who have camped in the park for nearly four weeks.