26th
In their coverage of Egypt, the media have been much quicker off the blocks.
We thought it would be interesting to compare how rapidly UK mainstream media were off the blocks in reporting unrest in Tunisia compared to more recent events in Egypt.
To do this we analysed the tweets from official Guardian, The Independent, Sky News, Channel 4 News, BBC, The Telegraph and Financial Times’ Twitter accounts, and those of their journalists. You can find the various lists we used here.
We found that the volume of tweets on the first day of unrest in Egypt was 44 times higher than the average number of tweets recorded during the first days of unrest in Tunisia (December 17th-19th). While the gap falls on January 8th (six protestors are reportedly killed), there were still 26 times fewer tweets about unrest in Tunisia compared to ones relating to the events of January 25th in Egypt.
Interestingly, Google Insights shows a similar picture for search queries within news & current events in the UK.
You can view a complete timeline of events in Tunisia on Al Jazeera.
