MEDIA AND ZEITOUN

Zeitoun is in Cairo, Egypt.  From 1968-70 there were reported apparitions of the Virgin Mary on the roof of a church there.  Unlike most of such visions, this was seen by vast numbers of persons.  The visions continued over a period of time.  They were also photographed.  Egyptian police investigated buildings round about to make sure there was no one using a projector.

Whatever you make of the phenomenon, my purpose is to point out the astonishing lack of interest in the matter shown by the media.  There was strong evidence here for the intrusion of the Other into the Everyday.  So convincing was the apparition that you would have expected television cameras to be poised there.  Yet, little or nothing of this made it into the television bulletins and newspapers.

Why the indifference?  I would put it down to perhaps two reasons:-

(a) News  sources felt there must be a mundane explanation for the phenomenon because they felt things like that simply don't happen.  Here we see something dangerous, a mentality that says, if something is far out of the ordinary we don't report it, because such things cannot be true.  Therefore, news reporting depends on what a news editor may reckon as being possible.  This is why the sightings of the more well-known cryptids rarely make major news bulletins, except for the Loch Ness Monster, which is sometimes reported in a semi-jocular way.  One suspects various anomalous occurrences may never make their way into the media.

(b) News sources feel that the public will just write off such things.  In this case, they will just say that the story is the result of fanaticism because of the religious element.

This I feel is worrying because it seems that news sources will  use the criterion of what is a sort of general range of belief  and interest to determine what they tell us, rather than reporting what has occurred and leaving it up to us to interpret it.  Thus we may miss an important event simply because news editors feel it is too anomalous or too outside the field of viewers' interest to report, however important it may be.  Indeed, I remember once hearing a newspaper editor saying that she made her main story of the day not the most important one, but the one most likely to be a talking point by people meeting for lunch and the like.  If the media see as their function merely to cater for popular taste, a sort of censorship informs the dissemination of news, which is surely a cause for concern.

If anyone is interested in the Zeitoun phenomenon, there are several websites dealing with it.  Here is a link to one:

now read on.....