Egypt: Biggest protest in history?
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Hello and welcome to More or Less on the BBC World Service. I'm Ruth Alexander. It's said that Egyptians have taken part in the biggest uprising in history. For weeks, the streets were crowded with demonstrators, voicing their opposition to the government of Islamist Mohamed Morsi, the first democratically elected president, who the army has since removed. It's certainly been a massive show of people power, but the biggest public protest in history? It's an audacious claim that would be hard to prove, and yet many have been making it, including our friends at Fox News. But who was the first to say it? Well, apparently, it was the BBC. Awkward. Slate magazine in the United States tracks the claim back to a post on Twitter which quotes the BBC as reporting this fact.
When asked about it, the broadcaster said it could find no record of the claim being made by a BBC source.
What claim about Egypt's protests is being investigated?
But that doesn't mean the claim hasn't been made on a BBC programme. Take this example. A professor of political science, Mona Makram Abaid, was being interviewed on another of the BBC's radio shows recently, and this is what she said.
You can't disagree with the fact that 30 million people who are in the streets resisting his rule. This is the largest revolutionary outpouring in human history.
But has any BBC journalist endorsed this claim? Well, the BBC's a big beast, but we rang the people who we thought should know, staff at the corporation's Cairo bureau. Did you say that? We certainly hope not, they said. In fact, they don't even buy the 30 million figure, which has been widely quoted by international media and across social websites like Twitter.
I think that's a gross exaggeration. That's rubbish, really.
Wira Davies, the BBC's Middle East correspondent, speaking to me from Cairo.
It doesn't feel any bigger than it did back in 2011 when we had the revolution. About half a million people can fit into Tarahir Square. So it's impossible to say when there's a big protest in Tarahir Square and it's full that there are millions of people there. You simply can't fit them into Tarahir Square. I think nationwide there were millions of people this time protesting against the rule of the Muslim Brotherhood, but nothing like the 30 or 40 million people that some people quoted. That's 45% of the population. That's impossible because there are too many young people in Egypt for those maths to work anyway.
He's right, a fifth of Egyptians are aged under 10. So where has the figure of 30 million protesters come from? Well, no matter how hard we tried, we couldn't find a source for it, or any other number for that matter, because there have been a few. Now, we're lucky enough to have a hotline to BBC Monitoring, a group of journalists who spend all day watching the world's open source media. Problem is, they're baffled by all the numbers being reported too. Here's Chris Greenway.
One figure that comes up a lot is 17 million. That was quite widely reported on the 30th of June and the day subsequently. However, I've not really been able to pin down the original source for that better than people quoting quote-unquote experts. However, later that evening, the state-owned MENA news agency reported the Interior Ministry as denying that it had given any estimate. So it doesn't appear to have come from them. We have Reuters quoting a military source that evening saying as many as 14 million. And then we have subsequent reports, including from an Egyptian newspaper on the 2nd of July, saying there was another estimate of 33 million. And I've seen that figure of 33 or some cases 30 million widely reported both by Egyptian and foreign sources saying
At least that gives a flavour of how many numbers are coming out of Egypt and how little evidence there is for any of them. But that doesn't mean they're not important. Rather, they're a vital part of the arsenal in this political battle.
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