State Power 2.0: Authoritarian Entrenchment and Political Engagement Worldwide by Muzammil M. Hussain & Philip N. Howard

Author:Muzammil M. Hussain & Philip N. Howard [Hussain, Muzammil M. & Howard, Philip N.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, Security (National & International), Public Policy, Social Policy
ISBN: 9781409454694
Google: U3qRmQEACAAJ
Goodreads: 21082226
Publisher: Ashgate
Published: 2013-01-15T14:04:04+00:00

Al-Masry Al-Youm and the Challenge to Egyptian State Media Hegemony

Al-Masry Al-Youm emerged in 2004, after a loosening of press laws in Egypt that coincided with the Bush Administration’s short-lived period of democratization in the Middle East. No coherent theoretical rationale has successfully explained why the Egyptian state at this particular juncture decided to open its press system to media outlets which almost immediately began to offer readers more critical evaluations of state policies than had traditionally state-run media. However, the events of 2003–6 do suggest strongly that authoritarian regimes react to pressure from their primary patrons, in this case the United States (Brownlee 2008). Unlike most newspapers in Egypt, which either are operated indirectly by the state, like the flagship state paper, Al-Ahram, or by the licensed political parties, Al-Masry Al-Youm offered a model which had not been seen in Egypt in decades—a privately-financed company staffed by journalists and editors who appeared to be independent from the state security apparatus. Al-Masry Al-Youm was followed in short order by the founding of the opposition weekly Al-Dustur, which was widely regarded as having an Islamist bent, and the daily newspaper El-Badeel in 2008, a left-leaning, secular outlet sympathetic to the burgeoning labor movement. Collectively these outlets comprised an entirely new sector in the Egyptian print environment—the independent press.

Collectively these papers were instrumental in breaking or giving in-depth coverage to countless stories that put the government in a bad light and which originated in the country’s rich and vociferous blogosphere—from the torture scandal originally broken by the blogger Wael Abbas, to the sexual harassment of women in downtown Cairo, and more recently the killings of Baha’is in an Upper Egypt village, and the fatal police beating in June 2010 of Khaled Said (his murder would spark a Facebook movement that contributed heavily to the uprising). Journalists at these papers often worked hand-in-hand with bloggers—who were even more willing to cross the so-called red lines of Egyptian journalism (Faris 2010a). Some of these bloggers eventually came to work for Al-Masry Al-Youm, and some Masry journalists have their own blogs. Al-Masry Al-Youm was a pioneer in creating digital content in Egypt prior to the uprising—years before the events of January 2011, the paper had transformed itself into a hypermedia operation, complete with video journalists and an extensive online archive. This last point is crucial. Even if a reporter for a paper was arrested, his article was likely to be left online for anyone to see. The digital components of Al-Masry Al-Youm reinforce the idea that we cannot artificially separate digital media from traditional (broadcast) media.

One of the primary stories told to push the narrative of an Egyptian media environment descending into greater repression in the years 2007–10 was the arrest and imprisonment of Al-Dustur editor Ibrahim Eissa over reports of President Mubarak’s death in the summer of 2007. Eissa’s trial followed closely on the heels of the 2007 sentencing of four newspaper editors to prison for “defaming” President Mubarak and his son Gamal. Rumors of

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