In recent years, the emergence of well-resourced Arab media had already begun to challenge the unipolar tendencies of Western media. 2011 was a bumper year for news, from the Japanese tsunami to near meltdown in the eurozone, from the global Occupy movements to the UK press phone-hacking scandal. Before all that, came the extraordinary events of the Arab Spring, from Tunisia through Egypt to Libya and many other states. Having had so much to cover, how well did news perform in the year-end review of these epic events in the Arab World, and what does the reporting tell us about news makers, their values and objectives? As they covered the first anniversaries of the uprisings, this paper reviews the relative importance broadcast news operations attach to the various outcomes, the definitions of democracy and freedom deployed, and compares the quality of coverage across their different platforms.