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Schumacher-Matos: Kelly McEvers 5 January 2012 report Bahrain: The Revolution That Wasn t left listeners who may not be following the events in Bahrain since 14 February 2011 with a number of misperceptions. Perhaps the most glaring example came in Linda Wertheimer s introduction to the piece, in which she stated, Only one of the major uprisings has definitely failed. That declaration is in the past tense, while the uprising in Bahrain is an ongoing event whose conclusion has not yet occurred. In many respects, the 14 February 2011 uprising has been wildly successful in raising the real situation that has prevailed in Bahrain for decades into the world s consciousness. For years and years it was possible to hear no mention of Bahrain in many mainstream media outlets in the United States, including NPR. In fact, I searched for any mention of the word Bahrain on the npr.org website. The search yielded 660 hits. Sorted by date, some 358 (54.2% of the total) have occurredSINCE 14 February 2011. The other 302 mentions (and some of these were just mentions in reports with very little to do with Bahrain) date from 13 February 2011 back to 14 February 1996! In other words, Bahrain has been mentioned more in the past year (since the uprising that has definitely failed began) than it had been in the previous 15 years! As for the actual report that was broadcast, it too contains factual errors. At 2:15 we hear how Bahrain became the one Arab country whose uprising was definitively put down, while at 3:18 we hear of The end of Bahrain s uprising . While the mass gathering at the Pearl Roundabout was, as the report accurately portrays, ended and the monument dismantled, the continued presence of both spontaneous (near daily) and planned protests (for instance Occupy Budaiya Street from last month) and protests following the ongoing funerals of democracy protesters indicates clearly that this uprising has yet to reach its conclusion, and both these statements are therefore inaccurate. At 6:43 we hear This is all that s left of Bahrain's revolution. In fact, Bahrain s revolution not only continues daily in Bahrain, but it has been spread to many other countries by a determined cadre of human rights activists. Maryam Alkhawaja (whose father and sister have been jailed and subjected tochemical agents and various other forms of abuse at the hands of security personnel) has traveled throughout continental Europe, Scandinavia and the United Kingdom to spread the news of the ongoing revolution to sympathetic audiences. Nabeel Rajab, one of the founders of the human rights movement in Bahrain and president of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, on 1 December received the 2011 Ion Ratiu Democracy Award from the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, DC. People such as these are keeping the revolution alive in a variety of forums in many different countries, as well as on social media websites like Facebook and Twitter which reach a global audience each day. There are other problems with this report, some of which can be traced in part to differences in text from the story on the website (at www.npr.org/2012/01/05/144637499/bahrain-the-revolution-thatwasnt<http://www.npr.org/2012/01/05/144637499/bahrain-the-revolution-that-wasnt>) versus the transcript (at www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=144637499<http://www.npr.org/templates/

transcript/transcript.php?storyId=144637499>). At 7:22, for instance, the transcript says what listeners heard ( See now it s over, right? ), which is a more ambiguous version of the website story s For now, the uprising appears to be over. It is unfortunate that the struggle for democracy and genuine participation in the political and economic affairs of Bahrain by a large majority of that country s citizens couldn t be accomplished and had a ribbon tied around it on the timeframe of the U.S. media s news cycle. The reform of a system of government that has entrenched tyranny and enforced it brutally for over 225 years takes time. Your editorial judgment that this effort has ended unsuccessfully is most regrettable, and screams out for clarification, if not outright retraction, in the spirit of accuracy.

Tom Rizzo Akron, OH