Arab Media & Society

For example, the offices of al-Badeel, Egypt’s newest independent daily, are a sober and serious place where responsible journalism of the left-wing variety has found a home. Yet, the trials that al-Badeel experienced in setting up the paper tell of a culture of official obfuscation that tried even the patience of the serene Mohammed el-Sayyid Said.

“The law forces you to produce the daily paper by the end of three months after the issuance of the license. 90 days to establish a daily paper is far short of what is needed. So, you have to start before you know you will get the license.”

Al-Badeel waited seven months for their license, which was finally issued during the summer months of 2007, the worst time for circulation figures. It is still a critical period for the paper. To add insult to inaction, Mohammed el-Sayyid Said was the recipient of another defamation suit, the details of which were even more marginal than Ibrahim Eissa’s.

The procedure by which potential independent papers must wait for a permit from the government to commence printing (and which of course may be turned down), is an unnecessary and anachronistic stricture for the open market economy that Egypt is attempting to become.

The logical step, according to Mohammed el-Sayyid Said, is to abolish the SPC’s right to issue licenses for newspapers.

“We have really been struggling to abolish this system of licensing, what we need is just registration, and this is what we [the Press Syndicate] demanded all along. Licensing means that they have the right to withhold the license. Which means that they don’t recognize that expression is a right. That is the difference. We want to achieve the right to free expression, which means only registration.”

In addition, the laws still extant which allow imprisonment for journalists need to be repealed. Pressure that would bring about such a change is, despite the disappointments of the 2006 Press Law, most likely to come from the Journalists’ Syndicate.  Following elections for a new syndicate chairman and council in November 2007, however, the union is more likely to use soft power in pursuit of this aim than outright confrontation with the government. Makram Mohammed Ahmed, widely perceived as the government’s choice, won the chairman’s election comfortably, aided by a promise for a LE200 ($40) pay increase for the country’s underpaid journalists.

It would also be logical that the government of Egypt, reveling in the country’s status as one of the Middle East’s most athletic emerging markets, would extend the economic liberalization process to the state’s media sector, and sell off the hugely inefficient state papers. This is unlikely any time soon, but with the current example of some private-sector papers to show how Egypt’s newspaper industry could look like, it ought to happen eventually.

Hisham Kassem, one of the founders of al-Masry al-Youm, argues that the recent poisonous atmosphere has to give way to a more independent press. “It is natural that things have developed this way. [Recently] the government has had a nervous breakdown. But the only way forward is to have an independent media.”[15]

That, of course, would entail real political openness something which, until the “succession file” is closed, may be in perilously short supply.

Jeffrey Black is a freelance journalist covering politics and business in the Middle East. A graduate of Trinity College Dublin and the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London, he began his media career at the now sadly departed Cairo Times.