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Coverage of the Egyptian Revolution: The U.S. Media’s Ethnocentric Bias

By Tim Murphy

An ethnocentric bias underlies the U.S. media’s coverage of certain international events. Such reporting focuses primarily on how faraway events affect America and its interests abroad — often in an intangible and indirect fashion — rather than reporting on how the events directly impact the local population or region.

This media trend is displayed prominently throughout the news coverage of the Egyptian Revolution earlier this year. As seen in the February 2011 Seattle Times article, "Uprising in Egypt Transforms American Foreign Policy,” which illustrates a broader trend throughout media coverage of the revolution, such reporting turned foremost attention to how the revolution will affect future American policy. Yet it largely ignored the significant ramifications that Egypt’s political instability has on its own people. This ethnocentric coverage, which ponders and discusses at length how this event will impact the U.S., is relevant in its own right, but portrays only a small facet of the event to the reader. The most critical and immediate questions, such as the revolution’s political, economic, social and military consequences in Egypt and the surrounding region, among other issues, are hardly mentioned.