While privately-owned newspapers flourished in 2005, the state-affiliated print media gave in to retrenchment. Fatemah Farag reviews a year in the press Peruse the local newsstands and your options are staggering. State-affiliated papers vie for space with independent dailies like Al-Masry Al-Yom and weeklies like Sawt Al-Ummah and Al-Osbou'. Nor is this such vying easy, for while the former have maintained, and even consolidated, their pro-government bias, emerging papers like the phenomenally popular Al-Dostour have crossed all the established "red lines" in promoting an agenda opposed to the regime. During 2005, the opposition party presses -- Al-Wafd, Al-Arabi, Al-Ahali and Al-Tagammu -- gained two new publications, Al-Ghad and Al-Karama ; along with the older mouthpieces, these papers advocated their respective agendas while showing more boldness, making for even greater competition. That said, perhaps the most staggering development of the year was the replacement of long-standing board chairmen and chief editors of the state-affiliated press; it was an as yet unexplained decision to suddenly implement the law stipulating that chief editors may not hold their positions after the official retirement age of 65. Soon afterwards, a fierce media campaign targeted the ousted parties; orchestrated by Mustafa Bakri, editor-in-chief of Al-Osbou', and Adel Hamouda, editor-in-chief of the newly- opened independent paper Al-Fagr, the campaign featured stories accusing figures like Dar Al-Tahrir's Samir Ragab, Al-Ahram's Ibrahim Nafie, Akhbar Al-Yom's Ibrahim Seada and Rose El-Youssef's Mohamed Abdel-Moneim of corrupt practices and mismanagement. There were tales of tens of millions of pounds siphoned off, thus financially draining institutions: Abdel-Moneim was accused of consuming LE5,000 worth of food per week (75 per cent of the proceeds of an advertisement for a five-star restaurant); Samir Ragab, former editor-in-chief of Al-Gomhouriya, of building himself a palatial office, complete with Jacuzzi, within the new Gomhouriya building; and Nafie of using insider information to make over LE1 billion for his sons in a land deal. Many such claims are palpably absurd, and while Bakri claimed to be in possession of documents to prove them, the prosecutor -- in response to a complaint filed by Nafie -- has recently announced that no such documents exist. As for the reason behind the campaigns, particularly the one targeting Nafie, speculation continues; why Bakri has not been sued for libel is unknown, but rumours of corruption in the state-owned media continue to resound. In September, the journalist community expressed dissatisfaction with the status quo by re- electing the relatively reform-minded Galal Aref, who was running against the Al-Ahram candidate, Ibrahim Hegazi, to the position of Press Syndicate head. That the state-affiliated press is in financial straits is beyond doubt; breaking with the tradition of assigning the positions of board chairman and chief editor to the same person has been, ostensibly at least, meant to help fix faulty financial structures. Only this week Shura Council Chairman Safwat El-Sherif announced the drawing up of a special committee headed by former Prime Minister Ali Lutfi to investigate the situation, and suggest solutions -- a process in which former chairmen and chief editors will be largely consulted. At the same time, El-Sherif left no room for doubt about his support for their replacements: the shift brought "new life" to the national press, and "has been broadly appreciated," he said. Many would beg to differ, for unless financial restructuring is coupled with editorial reform, the process amounts to nothing. And it further takes away from the new editors' credibility that they adopt an unequivocally pro-government line. Mohamed El-Sayed Said, deputy head of Al-Ahram's Centre for Political and Strategic Studies, elaborates: "The new chief editors chosen [by the Shura Council] were not journalists of any prominence, and are not characterised by any independent power base among the community of journalists. In short, they are not eminent public figures. Hence they are extremely weak vis-à-vis the regime. Further, some of them have long-standing ties with the National Democratic Party (NDP), and have a personal incentive to support it." According to Said, the opinion pages of papers like Al-Ahram have actually experienced a setback, forgoing views from across the political spectrum in favour of "strong personal relations with the new chief editors". Ahmed El-Naggar, an Al-Ahram centre economist who has spent years documenting bureaucratic corruption and mismanagement, is more precise: "When the ceiling on freedom in society is higher than that expressed by the editorial policy of the public-owned media, you have a catastrophe. It seems the policy of state- owned newspapers is to remain mouthpieces for the regime, their editors' primary concern being their own proximity to the powers that be -- a state of affairs that has given way to public revulsion." So much so that the circulation of one of the largest dailies has reportedly gone down by 100,000 copies. This is partly explained by the fact that the editors in question are state-appointed; that they "no longer even try to appear objective or independent" has resulted in the state-affiliated press being accused of representing the state, in direct violation of its role as a public entity which is, at least in theory, answerable to the public at large. Parliamentary elections coverage was the litmus test in this regard, and an independent Cultural and Human Rights Studies Centre investigation has identified Al-Ahram as the least objective, having dedicated 95 per cent of its coverage to National Democratic Party (NDP) candidates; at 86 per cent, Al-Akhbar came in second. This dynamic has been described as a return to the mid-1970s, when chief editors like Musa Sabry ( Akhbar Al-Yom ) made their mark via blatant bias towards President Anwar Sadat. "The regime senses it is in crisis," Said said, "a fact compounded by the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood. It would seem that the bureaucracy and security forces now run the country alone. And this is clearly reflected in the performance of the state-owned press." Much debate focussed on the question of ownership: so long as the state continues to patronise a newspaper, it seems improper that the president should effectively appoint that paper's editor. Many point to the UK's BBC network or National Public Radio in the US as better examples of publicly-funded bodies run by independent boards. The press laws passed in the early 1960s placed ownership of the press in the hands of what was the country's sole political party, the National Union, later the Arab Socialist Union; although the Shura Council inherited the press from the latter following the introduction of a multi-party system under President Sadat in the late 1970s, the law has yet to change. The council, an otherwise politically-impotent entity, has the authority to appoint board chairmen and chief editors; the appointments have traditionally been politically motivated. At present privatisation is proposed as a possible overall solution -- it has even been said that the anti-corruption campaign was orchestrated to promote it -- experts like El-Naggar see employee ownership as a more effective course: "When the media was privatised in Eastern Europe, it was bought by the mafia; it is now the mouthpiece of the mafia." Said feels that, in light of overall policy in 2006, some press privatisation will probably occur: "To date they have been content with privatising Dar Al-Taawun, which has no impact on state propaganda and combines bad management and lucrative assets. But I suspect they will move on to one of the main institutions -- either Al-Gomhouriya or Al-Akhbar. My own vote goes to Al-Gomhouriya," he adds ironically, "it being a symbol of the 1952 Revolution." On the other hand, as Medhat El-Zahed, editor-in-chief of Al-Tagammu, points out, "the development of a privately-owned press in 2005 has to do with the growth of a more vocal socio- political movement. After all, this is the year of Kifaya, Freedom Now and 9 March -- to name but a few. It's something that had to reflect on the media, and the national press could not accommodate it." During the parliamentary elections, indeed, Al-Masry Al-Yom was widely preferred for its objective coverage, revealing what the state-affiliated press ignored and the opposition party press distorted. An arguable scoop of the year would be the testimony, which Al-Masry Al-Yom published, of Noha El-Zeini, a member of the judiciary responsible for supervising elections who chose to vividly expose the fraud and corruption she saw undertaken on behalf of the NDP. El-Zahed speaks of a thirst for real news that the independent press is quenching. In any case, distribution figures at the state-affiliated, tabloid and specialised publications are all down, while Al-Tagammu made a 500 per cent improvement in the wake of the appearance of Al-Ghad and Al-Karama and, notably, the re-launch of Al-Dostour. "The privately-owned press is the most important achievement in Egypt over the last year," in Said's view, "taking precedence over even the rise in street activism, for it has a more tangible effect in its ability to reach out to the average citizen." It is also, he says, "the regime's main way of demonstrating political reform, which is why I think it will stick around until they can replace it with something else." All of which points to a new space for freedom of expression that will be difficult to push back quite yet; in the end it is what journalists make of it that counts.
