A Google News search for "Obama Cairo speech reaction" yields nearly 12,000 stories from media outlets around the world.  Nearly a week after the historic address at Cairo University, we've heard reactions from German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the Vatican, and Rush Limbaugh.

What hasn't been popping up in these stories so often is the reaction from those to whom the speech was actually addressed: the world's 1.5 billion Muslims.  Beyond government officials and Arab TV pundits, we haven't heard much from the everyman of the Muslim world. Surely enough time has passed that the world's leading news organizations could have conducted polls or done profile stories about the people in Muslim nations, and the state of their hearts and minds.

The Dallas Morning News offered up an interesting editorial in the wake of Lebanon's recent elections, in which voters surprisingly voted down Hezbollah and elected a pro-Western majority.  The piece suggested that election results, especially in Lebanon and Iran's upcoming election on Friday, will be the key to judging the success of Obama's speech.  But neither the Dallas Morning News coverage nor a New York Times analysis of the Lebanon election included sound bites with Lebanese citizens, only academics.

At first it seemed to be a sign of the times, another harbinger of the dwindling resources of American journalism abroad.  But then I started seeing photo galleries, like this one from the New York Times, of Muslims from Beirut to Baghdad watching the speech on flat screen TV's in restaurants and hookah bars.  But no interviews, no quotes in the captions.  And the article that went with the photo gallery quoted only politicians and academics, some of them American.

The Los Angeles Times' Amro Hassan wrote from Cairo, "Talking to politicians, analysts, religious figures and citizens, both before and after the speech, I could sense that Obama has become an accepted figure among most Egyptians."  (At least he mentioned the "citizens.")

But allowing politicians, analysts and religious figures to speak for the Islamic world does nothing to open the doors of mutual communication and understanding between Americans and Muslims abroad.

Of course, out of the 12,000 pieces written, a few organizations did come through with traditional man-on-the-street reaction. With its 24-hour news cycle, CNN correspondents filed stories from cafes in Jerusalem and the streets of Kabul on the day of the speech itself.  The Wall Street Journal also offered coffee shop reactions from Cairo itself. 

But in an age of Twitter and real-time reactions to almost everything, the overall lack of dialogue with Muslims is surprising.  CNN did one of its usual iReport roundups with reaction from the blogosphere and video uploads from Muslims responding to the speech from Riyadh to Montreal.  These brief glimpses of reaction were what President Obama himself hoped to gain by streaming the speech live on whitehouse.gov and linking to the White House's Facebook page where people around the world could post their reaction.  The BBC took advantage of social media and found the real story that was lurking there.  By really digging into the Twitter dialogue, they discovered substantive, significant tweets from around the Arab world, not just a few random sound bites to fill air time.

Of course, traditional news organizations are still exploring ways to effectively incorporate new tools like Facebook and Twitter into their coverage, but for a story that crucially hinged on the opinions of average Muslim citizens, it seems for the most part to have been a missed opportunity.