Nation magazine has published an article titled “The Muslim Brotherhood’s War on Egyptian Media” that provides additional information about the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s ongoing efforts to control the country’s media. The article begins:
March 13, 2013 In November 2010, veteran left-wing journalist Hani Shukrallah helped found Al Ahram Online, a news site that would tell the story of Egypt’s coming revolution to hundreds of thousands of readers in the English-speaking world. Since the ouster of the Mubarak regime, which had removed Shukrallah from his post at Al Ahram’s print edition in 2005 for his critical commentary, he has been forced to relive the past. ? This January, Shukrallah received a call from Al Ahram’s new chairman, who had just been installed by the ruling Muslim Brotherhood. With only a vague justification, the chairman told him that he must retire. Just over two years since the anniversary of the transformative events that promised to usher in a new Egypt, Shukrallah has arrived at the depressing conclusion that the vise of media repression has not loosened at all since Mubarak’s departure. Under President Mohamed Morsi, the Brotherhood-led government has employed a combination of legal tricks and street-level vigilantism to impose its will on the country’s media. I spoke to Shukrallah in February, just after I returned to the United States from an extended visit to Cairo. Over the course of several weeks in the city, I saw the conflict between the Brotherhood and its urban-based opposition turn violent, first in December, with a massive street clash near the Presidential Palace that began when Brotherhood supporters bused in from the countryside assaulted young protesters encamped outside the palace, which ended with hundreds injured and a handful dead. Following a wave of attacks days later on Brotherhood offices around the country, a group of Salafists held a sit-in outside Media City, an area outside Cairo that is home to many of Egypt’s private broadcasting outlets. There, the Islamists called for the ‘purification’ of the media, accusing the networks of inciting violence against Morsi and attacking journalists in retaliation.
Read the rest here.
A post from earlier this month reported that opposition newspapers were accusing the Muslim Brotherhood of trying to infiltrate and hinder their operations. A post from last month reported that the Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt may be responsible for forcing out the long-time editor of Ahram Online, described as the “most influential English-language website in Egypt and Al-Ahram’s voice to the world.” A post from August 20212 reported on efforts by the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood to control the nation’s media. In what appeared to be a gesture towards international pressure, various media are reporting that Egyptian President Morsi had issued a decree rescinding preventive detention for publish offenses and the freeing of a newspaper editor jailed for alleged publishing crimes.