If Minister Anal el-Fekky did not watch last Sunday's edition of the program "90 Daqiqa" [90 minutes] on el-Mahwar Tv, I hope he will watch a recording. North Sinai Governor Mohamed Shousha was asked about the performance of the public media during the war on Gaza. The governor said very directly that there had been evident faults in the media and that President Mubarak had called him on the first day of the war asking him to open Rafah border crossing for a few consecutive hours a day. Instead, Arab satellite channels started depicting the crossing as sealed although this was totally untrue. The Egyptian media, for its part, did not say clearly and unequivocally whether the crossing was open or closed. For three days, we remained victims of foreign media lashing out Egypt's policy, showing things as they were not and leading people astray. Viewers had no alternative but to believe what they were told, as there was no alternative refuting those lies. The audience perhaps noticed that the host, Moataz el-Demerdash, swiftly changed topic once the governor mentioned the faults of the media, which he saw on the ground in Sinai while we saw them across the country. It seems el-Demerdash felt that the issue was too embarrassing and that it would not be appropriate to keep talking about it. It seems to the audience that he wanted to close this issue although the governor was speaking frankly and is certainly a member of the government's executive body. When he pointed to these faults, he surely did not want to embarrass anyone. Instead, he wanted us to find a remedy for those faults so that we do not have to deal with them when another crisis breaks out in the future. The President's instructions to the governor were unequivocal. Yet, it seems the media was living somewhere else especially during the first three days of the war, as the governor said and as we saw. I heard a minister saying at the time that over those three days the media was confused and did not do what it had to do. When I wrote about the media for ten days in a row, Information Minister Anas El-Fekki became angry although I always write about this issue and not about him. Indeed, I always write – I am not sure about other journalists - because I want the Egyptian media to be at the top level and to be able to face the regional media, which develops and takes part in a competition we are not taking part in. Today, I am not writing this column to attack El-Fekki as a person, as replacing him with another minister tomorrow would not be a solution, as we shall see.
