Should Egypt Have a Free Press or Not? Mubarak Government Can’t Seem to Make Up Its Mind

By James J. Napoli

Egypt’s version of a “yellow press” may not have a very impressive track record for investigative journalism, but it did manage to blow the lid off at least one story: the utter confusion and bumbling that mark government efforts to spin a coherent press policy.

Publicly committed to a free and uncensored press, the government has nevertheless tried over the past several years to crack down on what it considered press excesses with repressive new legislation, endorsements of tighter ethics codes, bannings of offending publications, and arrests and jailings of journalists.

And just for good measure, Egypt’s investment authority got into the act in late March by banning printing houses in the country’s free trade zone from printing newspapers and magazines, thereby driving more than 30 publications offshore and maybe out of business.

If all this seems inconsistent with the notion of a free press, it is perfectly consistent with the confused attitude of the government toward the press, at least since the Nasser regime. The wild swings of the pendulum between repression and freedom over the past half-century have only picked up in frequency and velocity in recent years.

“We are in a very ambivalent situation,” Hassan Ragab, a columnist for the weekly Akhbar al-Yaum told the Washington Report a few months ago. Press policy is “not defined. There is no clear-cut policy. There is no rollback of press freedom, but there is no progress either.”

The skylines of Cairo and Alexandria are riddled with satellite dishes, cable TV is spreading, the Internet is booming, privatized media are gaining a firmer foothold and editors are growing more feisty. But government updates of press law have tended alternately to tighten and loosen and then tighten the screws.

In May 1995, for example, amendments to the penal code were peremptorily passed by parliament that imposed what were arguably the most repressive controls on the press in its 200 years of history. They provided heavy fines and prison sentences for a range of vaguely worded crimes, including abuse of public officials.

And in June of 1996, the regulation of the press was again altered, allowing for journalists to be tried in military courts and for newspapers and magazines to be banned without due process. President Hosni Mubarak eventually rescinded some—not all—of the most onerous provisions and transferred some enforcement responsibility to the Press Syndicate, a victory of sorts for the press.

“They want to teach this newspaper a lesson.”

Since then, the public has been entertained by the spectacle of running battles between elements of the press, such as the Islamist-oriented Al-Shaab, and top officials and personages, including the family of former Interior Minister Hassan El-Alfi. The tide of these battles has recently turned against the press.

A libel suit against Magdi Hussein, Al-Shaab’s editor-in-chief, resulted in his being sentenced to a year in prison at hard labor. The prosecutor general has also brought charges against executives and editors of several other newspapers for allegedly “insulting” officials.

And the sensational, non-partisan weekly El-Destour was suspended from publishing because it ran a statement, allegedly from the Islamist group Al-Gama’a Al-Islamiya, warning three Coptic businessmen to get out of Egypt or be killed. Gamal Fahmy, El-Destour’s managing editor, was sentenced in March to six months in prison. An editor at the government magazine Rose El-Youssef also was transferred out of his job for running the statement.

Since January, too, it’s been tougher to get new media started. The People’s Assembly, without warning, passed a measure stipulating that applications for new joint stock companies for publications, satellite broadcasting and remote sensing needed cabinet approval.

Even the foreign-language press, which has a relatively small circulation in Egypt, has not been unaffected in the increasingly repressive atmosphere, which was apparently stimulated by frustrated complaints from the president about how the press was going beyond all boundaries of responsibility.

English-Language Ban

The Cairo Times, an English-language biweekly, was recently banned for carrying an interview with the “Red Sheikh,” Khalil Abdel Karim, who advocates a liberal, apolitical interpretation of Islam. The fact that the Arabic press has also interviewed the sheikh, several of whose books have been banned by the Islamic Research Academy of Al-Azhar, apparently made no difference. The previous issue ran a biting, first-person account by one of the newspaper’s reporters of his arrest and interrogation by police.

“I believe that the matter is that they want to teach this newspaper a lesson,” Hisham Qassem, publisher of the Times, is reported to have said.

It may—or may not—be a coincidence that the Cairo Times was among the 30 or more publications that are no longer allowed to publish in Egypt’s free trade zone. All the publications must now go to Lebanon, Cyprus or Greece for printing and then be imported to Egypt, where censors can simply stop them from entering the country at the airport if they don’t like what they see in them. A few such bans by censors could easily bankrupt some of these publications, which generally operate on a shoestring.

Rasha Foda, publisher of digitalpress magazine, said she is now printing in Beirut. Even with the extra transportation costs, she said, printing outside the country is still cheaper than paying the 36 percent tax on advertising that she would have to pay if she published in Egypt outside the free zone.

Foda also observed that the decision to ban printing in the free zone made so little sense, especially from the perspective of an investment authority, that she and other publishers are hopeful the decision will be reversed.

Despite continual testimonials about Egypt’s wonderful investment environment appearing in the government press, the abrupt ban on printing in the free zones sent a discouraging signal to Egyptians and others considering ploughing money into new ventures.

What prompted it in the first place? No one seems to know, though insiders are suspicious that the recent opening of new, state-of-the-art printing plants, costing hundreds of millions of dollars, by the state-owned Al-Ahram and Al-Akhbar publishing houses might have something to do with it. The several printing houses in the free trade zone are privately owned and their reputation for high quality has made them increasingly competitive.

In any case, President Mubarak brought politics back into the equation at the opening ceremony for the Akhbar Al-Youm printing house in mid-April. The president reiterated his usual homily about Egypt’s “free” press. But, in case anybody had missed his prevailing mood, Mubarak reminded his audience that “any newspaper published from outside Egypt can be banned so long as it does not abide by [Egyptian social] values or so long as it seeks to stir up sectarian rift.” He also said it was fine to expose corruption, but that libel wouldn’t be tolerated.

The “yellow press” in the United States at the turn of the last century, like that now in Egypt, was in part the result of an increasingly competitive environment. This forced publishers and editors to appeal to readers with a product that was more entertaining, more sensational and simpler in its approach to news than ever before.

But the fact is that the Egyptian press has never had much claim to quality. For many decades it has been characterized by inaccuracy, weak and incomplete reporting, hysterical jingoism and irresponsibility.

Such “yellowish” flaws only seem more significant now because the government and its officials may be finding that they themselves are more frequent targets at a time when their power to control the media is slipping inexorably away.

James J. Napoli is a professor of journalism at the American University in Cairo.