The military had already shut down all the Egyptian television networks that supported President Mohamed Morsi on the night the general ousted him. Now, in the last four days, the new authorities have raided and shut down the offices of the pan-Arab Al Jazeera network, taken steps to deny its Egyptian license and, on Sunday, arrested its correspondent Abdullah El-Shamy on charges of inciting murder and sectarian violence. Al Jazeera, based in Qatar, was the only big Arabic-language network considered sympathetic to the Muslim Brotherhood.
Senior government officials, meanwhile, publicly scolded Western correspondents in two news conferences and a public statement for failing to portray the crackdown in the government’s terms: as a war against violent terrorists. On Sunday, even General Sisi joined the chorus, criticizing foreign news media for failing to appreciate his mandate to fight terrorism. The criticisms echoed incessantly through the state and private media, and, in an apparent response, vigilante supporters of General Sisi have attacked or detained at least a dozen foreign journalists, a vast majority on the same day that an adviser to the president delivered the first diatribe against Western news coverage.
“One could be forgiven for saying that there is a coordinated campaign against the foreign journalists,” Matt Bradley, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, said Sunday in an interview with Al Jazeera’s English-language sister network. He described being pulled into an armored personnel carrier by soldiers rescuing him after a mob tackled him, tore at his clothes and took his notebook.
Coming at the end of a week when security forces killed more than 1,000 Morsi supporters in the streets, the push to control how the news media portrays the violence is the latest sign of the government’s authoritarian turn, which its officials have justified as emergency measures to save Egypt from a coordinated campaign of violence by the Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Scholars and human rights activists say they see signs of broad coordination between Egypt’s state and private media to drive home the same messages. After the first mass shooting following the military takeover killed more than 60 Morsi supporters at a sit-in, for example, television talk shows across the state and private media seemed to suggest that the Islamists might have deliberately provoked the violence to tarnish the military. Later, all seemed to discover that even Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain had argued for limiting human rights in the interest of protecting national security.
“There is very clear coordination,” said Heba Morayef, a researcher in Egypt for Human Rights Watch. “Forgetting what is true or not, it is interesting that you hear the same thing from everybody.”
Prominent human rights activists whose criticism of the former government made them a staple of Egypt’s nightly talk shows for the last two years say invitations have dried up as they have continued to criticize the police’s disproportionate violence since General Sisi’s takeover on July 3.
The scholars say the sudden pro-government unanimity of the Egyptian news media, following the cacophonous explosion of news media freedom after the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak two years ago, is a throwback not just to the Mubarak era but much further — to the pre-satellite era when the government ran all Egyptian media. Some said the chorus of criticisms of the Islamists as “terrorists” — relatively seldom heard here until July — recalled the years of the early 1950s, when Col. Gamal Abdel Nasser consolidated his power by cracking down on the Muslim Brotherhood.
Even some of the headlines were almost the same, said Prof. Mona el-Ghobashy, a political scientist at Barnard who has tracked the Egyptian news media over the last eight months.
“It is the same hyper-nationalist discourse about how the Islamists are terrorists, that these people represent a transnational Islamism or some kind of foreign import, so they are not real Egyptians.” Officials now charge, without evidence, that many protesters are Syrian or Palestinian.
She noted a pattern of “dehumanizing” the Islamists across the state and private media that began shortly after General Sisi removed Mr. Morsi, when the Islamists established a tent-city protest camp. Talk-show hosts said participants of the sit-in had scurvy. Other media outlets gleefully repeated an allegation by a government-sponsored women’s group that the Islamists there were conducting “sexual jihad” with women at the protests.
To support the crackdown, she argued, “you have to dehumanize them,” Professor Ghobashy said.
Mayy El Sheikh and Asmaa Al Zohairy contributed reporting.
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/19/world/middleeast/egypt-lashes-at-foreign-news-media-over-coverage.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
