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Ed Webb

Social media helps dictators, not just protesters - The Washington Post - 1 views

  • In a recent article (ungated), I document the co-option of social media by governments in Russia, China, and the Middle East, and find four different ways in which they have begun to use social media to prolong their rule.
  • social media is increasingly being used to actually boost regime stability and strength, transforming it from an obstacle to government rule into another potential tool of regime resilience
  • social media is becoming a safe and relatively cheap way for rulers to discover the private grievances and policy preferences of their people
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  • social media is a reliable way to gauge the effectiveness of local officials, who are often unaccountable to their constituencies. Since they usually operate through opaque and byzantine institutions, the central government often knows little about the competence and popularity of their local representatives, who have every reason to lie about their performance
  • Cracking down on local corruption in turn makes the central government appear more responsive, increasing its effectiveness and legitimacy
  • social media provides an effective way to reach out to the regime’s supporters. Just as opposition leaders use social media to mobilize protesters, regimes can use it to organize and rally their own domestic allies – military or business elites, but also regular citizens motivated by patriotism or ideology
  • social media offers a convenient way to shape the contours of public discourse among the public at large. Governments have always used mass media – newspapers, radio, and TV – to disseminate regime-friendly propaganda. Social media, however, has the added benefit of being inherently decentralized, interactive, and non-hierarchical, and can thus more easily avoid the appearance of artifice
  • The opposite of Internet freedom may not be brute-force censorship but a deceptive blend of control, co-option, and manipulation
  • By shaping dominant narratives and mobilizing supporters, social media can help incumbents to guard themselves not only from domestic unrest but also from external pressures for reform
  • Autocrats have proven to be remarkably adaptive and resilient in the face of new challenges, and their subversion of social media could mean long-term problems for the future of democracy
Ed Webb

Iraq clamps down on media and broadcast networks covering protests - 0 views

  • the Iraqi National Communications and Media Commission shut down or gave warnings to 17 media institutions for covering the protests in Iraq. The offices of Al-Arabiya, Al-Hadath, Dijlah TV, Al-Rasheed TV, NRT, Al-Sharqiya TV, Al-Fallujah TV, Houna Baghdad and Al-Hurra were closed, while Al-Sumariya, Asia Network Television, Rudaw Media Network, Sky News Arabia and Ur Television were warned to change how they cover the demonstrations.
  • On Nov. 17, a mortar shell hit Iraq Art Co. in Karrada in the center of Baghdad.
  • Iraq Art Co. is a local production business that offers television services to several satellite channels such as the BBC, Al-Araby TV (owned by the Palestinian politician Azmi Bechara) and other channels. Al-Araby Al-Jadeed, which is affiliated with Al-Araby TV, said, “The missile was targeting the Al-Araby TV office in Baghdad.”
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  • On Nov. 8 and 15, two episodes of the news satire Al-Basheer Show were jammed, as soon as the broadcast began on the German DW channel. Jamming would start at 9 p.m. while the episodes were being shown, and would end an hour later at 10 p.m., when the show was over.
  • The government clampdown on the media and journalists has taken several forms, ranging from obscure threats to the shutdown of media institutions to jamming channels or not offering security protection. There were also insinuations that media channels have been inciting people to protest.
  • “I received a text message on my personal phone threatening to kill me and attack my family if I continue to use my phone to contact the channel where I work.”
  • The Iraqi Media House, a civil society organization in Iraq, reported that “as a result of the internet ban, 90% of Iraqi media coverage was cut off, and 70% of social media coverage was dead. Fears of targeting media channels and journalists also reduced coverage.”
  • The Press Freedom Advocacy Association in Iraq reported that there had been “89 violations against journalists," 33 death threats and the shutdown of or warnings to 17 offices and headquarters of media institutions.
Ed Webb

Egypt blames media for plot to topple Morsi - www.thenational.ae - Readability - 0 views

  • the media has become a weapon in the war over Egypt's future, diminishing the possibility of reaching any political accommodation
  • Islamist-run newspapers and broadcasters, along with Muslim Brotherhood government officials, allege that secularist media moguls have put in motion a plot to topple the country's first democratically elected president
  • Meanwhile, privately owned media organisations controlled by more secular Egyptians intimate that the Brotherhood is secretly infiltrating all branches of the state in a bid to force conservative values on Egypt's 84 million people
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  • Saleh Abdel Maqsoud
  • In an interview with The National on Monday, the veteran Muslim Brotherhood1 journalist insisted that he had transformed the ministry's small empire of state-run television channels and radio stations from being a mouthpiece for the president into an honest broker and non-partisan "voice of the people".
  • "Of course there is a conspiracy," he said in his office at the Maspero building on the Nile in downtown Cairo. "All you have to do is turn on the television and watch some of the private channels. They call a few dozen protesters a 'demonstration'. They call for toppling the regime." "Some powers don't want to use the democratic tools, the ballot box," he said. "They want to use violence and rally protesters."
  • After taking office last year, he replaced many executives who served during the Mubarak era and told staff that they should include all perspectives in their coverage. He also removed a rule preventing women who wear a headscarf from appearing as presenters and focused on reducing expenditures to tackle more than 20 billion Egyptian pounds (Dh10.8bn) of debt held by the state media
  • The main rule for his presenters and journalists was to accept the president as a legitimately elected leader and not call for his resignation. "But we interview people who say the president should resign," he said. "We don't censor. All views are welcome."
  • His claim "is simply laughable and can be refuted with 15 minutes of exposure to a newscast or commentary show", said Adel Iskandar, a visiting scholar at Georgetown University in Washington and an expert on Arab media. "For the most part, the news and political component of state media remains predominantly government public relations as it has always been … In three years, the institution basically switched bosses from Mubarak to the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces to the Brotherhood."
  • For decades, the red lines for journalists were clear. Criticising Mubarak's policies was permissible in Egypt before the 2011 uprising that ended his reign, but few dared to directly condemn the president. After the uprising, the rules all but vanished, leaving a host of divisive commentators from across the political spectrum to regularly accuse their rivals of secret plots.
  • "The nobility in the Egyptian media has disappeared. No one knows what to trust because it feels like everyone has an agenda, including Islamist shows, secular shows and the state media."
  • Egypt had no independent regulator for the media. Such an institution could create a legal framework for the media and establish a code of conduct, but the dissolution of the parliament last summer has put new laws on hold.
Ed Webb

Arab Media & Society - 0 views

  • tool in the hands of Arab states
  • a subversive force was seen in the 1970s, when cassette tapes of preachers denouncing governments for tyranny and corruption spread in Egypt and Iran
  • Arabic satellite news and entertainment media established by Gulf Arab states
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  • “new Arab public sphere”
  • two distinct political positions that characterized Arab politics in the period up to the Arab Spring uprisings in 2010-11: an approach on Al Jazeera sympathetic to Islamist groups across the region and more conservative pro-Western approach in Saudi controlled media
  • The Arab uprisings came at the moment of a third stage in the development of modern Arab media: that of social media
  • bitterly contested conflicts between youth-driven protest movements and governments who were caught absolutely unawares due to a variety of factors: close cooperation with Western governments, elaborate security apparatus and the arrogance that comes with being in power unchallenged for so long
  • Media in the post-Spring Arab world currently has been targeted by the forces of the state in their counter-revolutionary pushback
  • Gulf governments have focused on social media in particular
  • Since the military coup that removed the elected post-uprising government, the Egyptian government has used traditional preferred instruments of television and print media for propaganda and control
  • Another important feature of Arab media is how it has become an arena for the Sunni-Shia sectarian schism
  • media has been revamped and brought back into action as one element of a multi-faceted campaign involving the law, religion, surveillance and forces of coercion to face a range of internal and external enemies seen as challenging the very survival of governing elites. New media were momentarily a weapon against these entrenched systems of rule; for now, the rulers have mastered the new array of technologies and are back in command
Ed Webb

How Morsi and the Brotherhood Lost Egypt - Al-Monitor: the Pulse of the Middle East - 0 views

  • This controllable prosecutor-general, against which almost the entire prosecutorial corps protested and nearly succeeded in firing, was used quite clearly at will to go after the private media and the opposition as a direct extension of Morsi and the Brotherhood, while substantially legally shielding the Brotherhood at the same time.
  • In another breach of revolutionary consensus, Morsi and the Brotherood tightened control over state media and retained the nationally rejected role of information minister, already abolished briefly after the toppling of Hosni Mubarak. State-owned papers and channels were subjected to appointments of allied or controllable leaderships. The media often ran familiar propaganda-esque headlines that seemed taken out of the Mubarak days. Furthermore, the press did not provide neutral and balanced coverage of events, and state TV was almost always forced to host a Brotherhood guest on every talk show, or at the very least not host an opposition figure on his own. Reports of guest blacklists also began to surface once more. Charges of “insulting the president” and “contempt of religion” began to pile up against media figures, often made by Brotherhood allies rather than directly by the Brotherhood (though the presidency did press some charges before retracting them under local and international pressure). Morsi and the Brotherhood seemed to care very little about fixing the problematic legislative framework for media, and gradually appeared to find it handy, especially with a prosecutor-general that was under full control. 
  • Although the original claim was that the Shura Council would only rubber stamp consensus legislation until the lower house would be elected, it was turned into a full parliament. It discussed far-reaching and controversial drafts, including: a non-governmental organization law that was widely seen as capable of stifling civil society in Egypt; divisive electoral and political rights laws that were criticized as favoring the Islamists; and even a disastrous judicial reform law that would have axed around 3,500 existing judges in an already choking legal system. The latter draft was openly seen as a move to get rid of judges that were problematic to the Brotherhood’s expansionary plans, while there were wide fears of intentions to replace them with a new generation of more sympathetic judges or outright Brotherhood members.
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  • Christians increasingly felt marginalized under Morsi. Brotherhood-allied media regularly used sectarian language and claims. Many Christians felt unprotected from sectarian violence and that official moves were meant as decorative and to appease international opinion. Many also were deeply perturbed by Morsi's failing to show up for the pope’s enthronement. Few Christians were appointed to high-ranking positions in the state, and claims that the president would appoint vice presidents and include a Christian were not fulfilled.
  • Immediately after his speech, the investment authority and the prosecutor’s office began to move against the opposition media again, including putting the owner of an opposition channel on a no-fly list, reportedly restarting investigations against media figures. One channel was even taken off the air, and there was wide acceptance that other private media channels and figures were going to be decisively pursued once the June 30 protests would amount to nothing. There were even considerable leaks within the opposition before the uprising that the prosecution was planning to crack down on them after the June 30 protests, though that is a claim more difficult to substantiate. The lead management of a government-run conference center, which had recently hosted opposition press, was also sacked the following day.
  • Egypt will never find stability, and its democracy will never thrive, without inclusiveness, fairness, due process and separation of powers. The Brotherhood and its big base cannot be excluded or treated outside of due process. Repression, especially of a genuinely sizable, believing and passionate public group, will only lead to an explosion.
Ed Webb

Erdoğan's Turkey and the Problem of the 30 Million - War on the Rocks - 0 views

  • Erdoğan’s brand is waning in the cities, the coasts, and among young people. Neither the new Erdoğan-shaped presidential system, nor his expansionist foreign policy are popular in these parts. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, chronic unemployment and inflation extinguished any hope of him bouncing back in the polls. Despite his total control over the state, mainstream media, and major capital groups, the president is unlikely to ever get much more than half of the popular vote.
  • The Erdoğan government now faced a question that all successful populist regimes must solve: What to do with the minority? They certainly can’t be granted free and fair elections, lest they attain the means to exact revenge. Nor can they be deprived of all their rights of representation, lest they be driven to revolt or treason. So how does a very slim majority of a country suppress the other half indefinitely? How does it rest easy, knowing that its hegemony is locked in?
  • The Erdoğan government surely knows that an attempt to “nationalize” all of the 30 million would be unrealistic. Rather, it seeks to separate the leftists and Kurds among them and brand them as terrorists, then turn around and securely pull the center opposition into the nationalist opposition.
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  • the government first needs to contain the spread of the left
  • the People’s Republican Party (CHP), Turkey’s founding and currently main opposition party, has tried to contain this “patriot-terrorist” polarity. Its umbrella candidates for the presidency, ranging from the soporific Ekmeleddin Ihsanoğlu in 2014, to the firebrand Muharrem Ince in 2018, have failed. In the 2019 municipal elections, however, the CHP’s mayoral candidates did well, uniting the Kemalist-nationalist camp, Islamists, liberal cosmopolitans, as well as leftists and even some sympathizers of the Kurdish movement. These candidates won against Erdoğan’s men in all major cities, including Ankara and (in a repeat election) Istanbul. This was the first, and so far only, time Erdoğan’s containment of the left had been breached.
  • Many in the urban middle class, who are fairly indifferent about Kurdish rights, wanted to see Demirtas grow the HDP into a Turkish-Kurdish version of the European Greens. The idea at the time was to also expand into a grand center-left coalition that would prevent Erdoğan from establishing his hyper-centralized presidential system. Their momentum was cut short when months after the coup attempt, in December 2016, the government detained Demirtas on charges of terrorism and began a ruthless crackdown on the HDP’s activities that has since only gained in intensity.
  • The second part of the government’s strategy is to keep the left — crippled and branded as terrorists — within the political system. While Turkey’s politics is polarized between the government and the opposition, this creates a second polarization, this time within the opposition camp. It is this second polarity where the vast majority of political discourse takes place. From the perspective of a nationalistic system of valuation, in which being “local and national” reigns supreme, this is a fatal flaw. On the one hand, the various factions of the opposition can’t win a national vote unless they partner with the HDP to form a 50 percent bloc against Erdoğan. On the other, the nationalists within the opposition cannot be seen working with the “terrorists” of the pro-Kurdish left.
  • The left, however, puts up genuine systemic resistance: They reject the idea that the Turkish nation is pure and infallible. Like leftists elsewhere, they deconstruct official history, focusing on massacres of minorities and exploitation of the working classes. There is also an inextricable tie to the Kurdish movement, which in turn is linked to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) — an insurgency that has been waging war on the Turkish state for over four decades. The connection between the non-Kurdish left and the Kurdish movement is complicated and has gone through various stages in the recent past. For the Turkish right, there is little difference between leftist subversion and Kurdish insurrection. “I joined the police to beat up Communists” a crescent-mustached officer once told me, and he was talking about arresting Kurdish protesters.
  • the Erdoğan government finally seeks to pull the entire bloc to the right. This means focusing on liberal-minded urbanites whose nationalism has lapsed, and rekindling their faith in the national mythos. This is the most challenging aspect of its effort, and where it has done most poorly.
  • restructuring of the media. For the past few years, the government has been taking over media channels that centrist voters traditionally follow, then gradually shifting their tone to favor the government. The Dogan Media Group, owner of Hurriyet (Turkey’s former newspaper of record) and CNN Turk (a 24-hour TV news channel) used to cater to a secular, urban, and increasingly progressive audience. The group’s main audience overlapped with the centrist-opposition CHP’s voter base, whose older members are secularist-nationalists and younger members (often their children) are leftist-progressives. In March 2018, the media group was sold to an Erdoğan-friendly conglomerate, which fired many of its veteran journalists and changed editorial guidelines. The result has been a desensitized, less colorful version of the jingoist carnival running across Erdoğan’s formal channels. CNN Turk, especially, became a tool for the government to enter the living rooms of CHP voters and tell them that they were voting for terrorist collaborators. So insidious were these attacks that the CHP had to ban its members from getting on the channel, and call upon its electorate to boycott it.
  •  Erdoğan said “We have 18 martyrs and close to 200 wounded. In our country, we have the terror group’s so-called political organism. Aside from that, our nation is now in a state of Yekvücut.” The term is a favorite of the president. It is a combination of the Farsi term “Yek” meaning “single” and the Arabic word “vücut” meaning “existence,” or in the Turkish use, “body.” Erdoğan was thinking of the nation as a single biological organism, with the leftists and the Kurdish movement as foreign bodies
  • The opposition media — largely relegated to the internet — was reporting on the plight of the working class and the brewing economic crisis. Like free media across the West, they also questioned the quality and veracity of their government’s COVID-19 data. In a speech delivered in May, Erdoğan was unusually angry. He had clearly expected a Yekvücut moment and was struggling to understand why it hadn’t come about. His strategy to create a “local and national” opposition wasn’t working, and the frustration of it seemed to hit him head on. “I want to warn once again the media and other representatives who are in league with the CHP’s leaders,” he said, before launching into what was — even for him — an unusually vituperative attack: “You are not national, and your localness is in question,” he said, “you have always sided with whoever was treacherous [bozguncu], whoever was perverted, whoever was depraved” adding, “you are like the creatures in mythology that only feed on enmity, hate, fear, confusion and pain.”
  • The absurd accusations of fraud and coup-abetting aside, there is something to the idea that the opposition wants things to get worse. The Erdoğan government’s consolidation over the past decade has been so suffocating for opposition voters that many do look for deliverance in economic or natural disaster.
  • The Erdoğan government may have cut short the HDP’s rise, but it hasn’t been able to prevent leftist ideas from spreading. The CHP’s youth wings today are highly class-conscious and hostile to militant nationalism. Figures like the CHP’s Istanbul provincial head Canan Kaftancıoğlu , who campaign on a mix of feminism, workers’ rights, and anti-fascist slogans, are gaining a national following. The polarization within the opposition is likely deepening, with part of the 30 million become more “national,” while another part is becoming more leftist. This means that the great mass of right-wing sentiment is growing, but so is the left-wing minority. The “problem,” in the government’s view, may no longer be 30 million strong, but it is more acute, and perhaps more vexing, than before.
  • (gun ownership has soared since the 2016 coup attempt)
  • To Turkey’s governing class, the military coup of their imagination is not a matter of defending against an armed force trying to take over the government. Rather, it is a night of free-for-all, in which politics is stripped down to its violent core, and a majority at the height of its powers can finally put down the enemy within: the haters, the doubters, the creatures of mythology.
  • “Turkey will not only reach its 2023 goals [the centennial of the Republic], it will also be rid of the representatives of this diseased politics,” he said in May, hinting that he might cut the left out of the political system entirely. If this should happen, politics would be an uneven contest between Islamist, pan-Turkic, and secularist hues of Turkish nationalism. Far off, in the back streets of the big cities and in the Kurdish provinces, in second-hand bookshops and hidden corners of the internet, there would be a progressive left, weathering out what is surely going to be a violent storm.
Ed Webb

The Built-In Obsolescence of the Facebook Leader - 0 views

  • With great rapidity new groups and figures have been projected into the political limelight thanks to the springboard of popular social media channels, only often to disappear with the same speed, with which they had first appeared. Social media have proven to be a stage in which creativity and spirit of initiative of different radicalized sectors of the Egyptian urban middle class have found a powerful outlet of expression. One might say that they have to a large extent delivered on the techno-libertarian promise of being a meritocratic space, in which dedication and charisma could find the outlet that was not available in formal parties and NGOs and in the traditional intellectual public sphere. At the same time, activist' enthusiastic adoption of social media as a ready-made means of short-term mobilization has produced serious problems of organizational sustainability. Short-termist over-reliance on the power of social media has contributed to a neglect for the question of long-term organization, ultimately leading to the incapacity in constructing  a credible leadership for the revolutionary youth.
  • the image of the Egyptian political web as a sort of magmatic space: a space in which campaigns, groups, and personalities come and go, without managing to solidify into more durable organizational structures
  • political evanescence is the inconvenient accompaniment of the open and meritocratic character of social media
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  • low-cost organizational structure and no durable organizational mechanisms are put in place
  • While Ghonim had some basic activist experience, having done some digital campaigning in support of the presidential campaign of Mohammed el-Baradei in 2010, he was little known within activist circles. From the distance and safety of Dubai where he was working for Google, he collaborated with activists on the ground including Mohammed AbdelRahman Mansour who acted as co-admin on the page, and Ahmed Maher of the April 6 Youth Movement, the group that pioneered digital activism in Egypt. It was only after he was released from prison in the midst of the eighteen-day insurrection, that he suddenly became a famous and respected figure. Yet, Ghonim did not manage, neither he tried, to turn the great influence he had exercised during the revolution into any form of structured political leadership during the transitional phase. Ironically the Facebook fanpage he founded has discontinued its communications with a status message celebrating “the power of the people” on 3 July 2013, the day of the anti-Morsi coup. Ghonim has recently left the country for voluntary exile after a streak of attacks on the news media.
  • The political evanescence of digital activism in the Egyptian revolution needs to be understood in connection with the libertarian ideology of “leaderlessness” and “horizontality” that has provided a cultural framing for social media use among activists
  • it is apparent that the Egyptian revolution, as any great upheaval in history, was not completely spontaneous and leaderless. Rather it bore the mark of complex direction exercised in concert by multiple leaders, from grassroots groups on the ground as the April 6 Youth Movement, to organized forces such as the Muslim Brotherhood, Left opposition parties and NGOs, to end with digital activists responsible for spreading revolutionary information, recruiting online communities of supporters and publicizing protest events
  • he political evanescence of social media activism raises issues of accountability and democratic control on the new emerging leaders of social movements, because of a certain opacity that accompanies the fluidity and partial anonymity of online interactions
  • The case of Tamarrod demonstrates how the fluidity in the field of social media in the activist field, dominated by flexible groupings coordinated through social network sites can open space for opportunist groups. Both Wael Ghonim and the main leaders of Tamarrod were secondary figures in the activist scene in Cairo, despite the fact that some of them, had been previously involved in pro-democracy campaigns and in the Elbaradei presidential campaigns. Similarly to what happened with previous political groups it was a great extent this outsider aura that managed to gather so much enthusiasm from Egyptian youth. The group managed to build an extensive network across the country, collecting millions of signature (the exact quantity will remain unverified) to withdraw confidence from Morsi. However, it progressively became clear that Tamarrod was far from being simply a disingenuous and spontaneous citizens groups. It has been publicly confirmed that the campaign received substantial funding from a number of Egyptian entrepreneurs, including Naguib Sawiris. It is also reasonably suspected that the group received financial and operational support from the Egyptian army, and the so-called deep state, which saw in Tamarrod a sort of useful idiot to get rid of the Muslim Brotherhood and create a favorable climate for the coup d'etat. Since the campaign of repression orchestrated by al-Sisi and the new post-coup government, the group has been marred by intestine fight between different factions, and seems to have lost much of its “street cred” among Egyptian youth. It was yet another group falling victim of its own precipitous rise.
Ed Webb

Egyptian intelligence services extend control over media | RSF - 0 views

  • Reporters Without Borders (RSF) is worried about the way Egyptian media outlets are being taken over by businessmen linked to the government and intelligence services. The regime’s domination of the media continues to grow and is even affecting pro-government media.
  • Al Hayat was quietly taken over at the end of August. The new owner’s identity has not yet been officially announced but several Egyptian media outlets have reported that it was acquired by Falcon, a successful Egyptian security company whose CEO is a former senior military intelligence officer and a former head of the radio and TV regulatory agency.
  • the financial pressure came shortly after Al Wafd’s representatives in parliament expressed their opposition to the government’s controversial plan to hand over two strategic islands, Tiran and Sanafir, to Saudi Arabia
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  • A former military intelligence officer, who was also an armed forces spokesman, took charge of Al Asema TV in January.
  • ONTV, a popular TV channel that supported the government while occasionally broadcasting critical comments, was taken over in May 2016 by Ahmed Abu Hashima, a powerful multi-millionaire steel magnate said to be close to military intelligence and to President Abdel- Fattah al-Sisi. A month after the acquisition, the authorities expelled Liliane Daoud, a well-known ONTV programme presenter with a reputation for journalistic integrity. She was deportable because she has British and Lebanese dual nationality.
  • Hashima bought two other TV channels, Al Nahar and CBC, and four newspapers, Sout Al Omma, Ain, Dot Masr and Al Youm al Sabea, in 2016.
  • the editor had told that that “President Sisi is the newspaper’s new owner” and that it could therefore not continue to employ critical journalists
  • the government’s influence over the broadcast media landscape was also significantly enhanced in 2016 by the creation of a DMC, a major new TV network with a range of news, sports and entertainment channels. Dubbed “the mouthpiece of the intelligence services” by some journalists and launched with a patriotic anthem and Koranic chants, DMC gets permission to film where other privately-owned TV channels are denied access. It is also known to broadcast interviews that are presented as exclusives but just reiterate the regime’s pro-security, anti-Muslim Brotherhood dogma
Ed Webb

IRGC media producers open new front against Rouhani - 0 views

  • The Avant TV video, released on social media five days after protests erupted in Iran, which have thus far spread to dozens of cities and almost every province, carefully stitches together an emotional array of interviews of people unhappy with the economic situation and President Hassan Rouhani’s policies. With scarce public information available about Avant TV, and with the great pains its producers have taken to present it as an independent station, the video is intended to appear to be transparent, a true representation of the will of the Iranian people. Glaringly absent from the video are any criticism of the political establishment as a whole, which has been one of the main themes of the current demonstrations. Avant TV is in fact not independent at all. Al-Monitor has not been able to contact it, but two pro-regime media producers confirmed that it is only the latest example of a new media outlet backed by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) seeking to reinforce the narrative of the supreme leader above the politics of Iran.
  • Avant TV stems from the media wars at the heart of political factionalism both inside and outside Iran
  • The tactic that producers developed was to move away from content solely made for state television — which potential audiences almost automatically consider regime propaganda — to creating small production studios that develop content not easily identifiable as pro-regime. These ad hoc production studios receive funding from the IRGC and the government's cultural budget, but they remain small and unidentifiable on purpose.
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  • In revealing new details of his budget bill, Rouhani named, for the first time, the variety of state institutions, including cultural centers, that have received enormous funds and unconditional support from the regime. He attributed the move to a desire for transparency and an attempt to curtail corrupt use of state funds. The reaction on Iranian social media and in the local press was quick and harsh. People began attacking conservative and hard-line centers and clerics for taking so much from government coffers. “We couldn’t allow him to cut off our lifeline,” a producer at the regime production studios said after Rouhani revealed his new budget. “He and his supporters want to silence us by taking away our funding. But we will not be silenced. We will show him that people don’t agree with him.”
  • The protests that began on Dec. 28 in Mashhad were a response to Rouhani from hard-liners for his remarks on the budget as well as his other attempts to curtail hard-line forces. Much of the analysis on the reasons behind the sudden outpouring of protests points to its origin in hard-liners' attempts to organize anti-Rouhani rallies in the lead-up to the annual pro-regime 9 Dey rally, established by the supreme leader in 2009 to celebrate the suppression of the Green Movement. Indeed, Mashhad is notably home to two of Rouhani’s main rivals in the 2017 presidential elections, Ebrahim Raisi and Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf. The intent was for the protests to culminate in a large 9 Dey rally, but despite the hard-liners’ intentions, once people went into the streets, they eventually began to chant slogans against the supreme leader and the regime as a whole.
  • Regime production studios have thus begun to create videos that highlight economic anxieties and attack Rouhani’s handling of the government. These slick new productions are meant to look critical, but in the end, they reinforce a belief in the virtues and the leadership of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Avant TV is only the latest example of the ways in which factionalism within the Islamic Republic and opposition to the regime play out in the media landscape.
Ed Webb

Egyptian media gloats over fabricated Guardian articles | Mada Masr - 0 views

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    I know Mayton a little. He always had a bad reputation among fellow journalists in Cairo. Note how innacurate the Egyptian media reports are on this story: treating it as a propaganda gift to justify the local line that foreign media are biased against Egypt.
Ed Webb

Egypt's media bill may bring demise of small, online outlets - The Washington Post - 0 views

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    Egyptian journalists said Wednesday that a new draft bill regulating the media would likely bring the demise of dozens of low-budget, online media outlets serving as a refuge for young writers and liberal activists escaping government restrictions on freedom of expression.
Ed Webb

2011 NGO case reopened against Hossam Bahgat, Gamal Eid and others | Mada Masr - 0 views

  • Zarea has not been officially notified if CIHRS is involved in the case, he said, though he has read in local media outlets that the organization is indeed being investigated.Eid told Mada Masr that he also only found out about the case through the media, and has not been formally notified of the investigations.“The travel ban and the media reports are all I know about this case,” Eid said.Eid claimed that both he and his lawyer have attempted several times to find out why he was banned from travel, but to no avail. “I paid the fees for the request, but the officer told me, ‘I won’t tell you anything’,” Eid alleged.
  • “It is being regulated in a political manner, and the media is also playing a role,” Zarea told Mada Masr. “First a smear campaign is launched in the media, and then verdicts are issued.”
  • travel bans — which can remain in place for a year or longer — are often issued without notifying those implicated as to why, or if they are facing criminal charges. Travel bans and trials are often announced in the media before the defendants are informed, Zarea added, pointing to the example of Abdel Fattah, who learned about her travel ban from the talk show host Ahmed Moussa. “Is the state embarrassed to tell them that they are banned from travel,” he asked, “so it sends Ahmed Moussa to tell them?” 
Ed Webb

Arab Media & Society - 0 views

  • A prolific writer, Heikal penned dozens of books, chronicling events as a witness to history, his legacy linked with his association with Nasser. He was not just a journalist, newspaper editor, and later historian. Heikal was Nasser’s emissary with Western diplomats, a champion of Nasser’s brand of socialism and pan-Arab nationalism. He composed his speeches and ghost wrote Nasser’s political manifesto, The Philosophy of the Revolution. As the president’s alter ego, Heikal’s writings were read for clues to Nasser’s thinking. His influence derived from his proximity to power.
  • Student periodicals posted on the walls of the campuses emerged as the freest press in Egypt. Nasser for the first time became the object of direct criticism in the public space. A campaign against student unrest was waged in the state-owned media, which labeled the activists as provocateurs and counter-revolutionaries goaded by foreign elements
  • The state media wholeheartedly embraced socialism and pan-Arabism, becoming a filter of information and propaganda, instead of the promised transformation of the institution into one that supposedly guides the public and builds society. Critical voices were muted, the military junta was sacrosanct, and Nasser was fortified as a national hero. The failings of the regime were not attributed to the president, but to the reactionary and destructive forces of capitalism and feudalism. Nasser’s personal confidant Muhammad Hassanein Heikal was appointed chairman of the board of al-Ahram, then later of Dar al-Hilal and Akhbar al-Youm publishing houses.
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  • Long committed to a free media, Mustafa Amin was imprisoned for six months in 1939 for an article in Akher sa‘a (Last Hour) magazine deemed critical of King Faruq. An advocate of democracy and Western liberalism, he was arrested in 1965, tried secretly in 1966, and convicted of being a spy for America and smuggling funds. Sentenced to a life sentence, he spent nine years in prison before being pardoned by Nasser’s successor, President Anwar Sadat. Ali Amin, accused by Heikal of working for British and Saudi intelligence, went into exile in 1965.
  • Room for expression existed mainly in the literary pages of al-Ahram, where writers under Heikal’s wings, like Naguib Mahfouz, could publish works of fiction that could be read as challenges to the status quo.[5] As far as the press was concerned, censorship was directed at politically oriented news and commentary rather than the literary sections
  • During the conflict, as the Egyptian army, under Field Marshal Abd al-Hakim Amer’s command, was hastily retreating from Sinai, broadcast outlets aired invented reports of fabulous victories against the Zionist foe. At no other moment did the state media prove so woefully deficient, contributing to a deep sense of public betrayal.
  • The speech was written for him by prominent journalist Mohamed Hassanein Heikal and tactfully framed a romp of Arab armies as a “setback,” displaying Heikal’s knack for being both a propagandist and political powerbroker.   It was a moment that brilliantly served to shore up Nasser’s support. Egyptians took to the streets demanding that their leader stay in power. “The People Say ‘No,’” declared Akhbar al-youm (News of the Day) in large red writing. In smaller black lettering the headline read, “The Leader Discloses the Whole Truth to the People.” It is difficult to say how populist and genuine the appeal was and how much of the public display of support for Nasser was behind-the-scenes political machinations of the regime and its media. While Nasser did stay in power, it was only later that Egyptians could comprehend the true extent of the defeat—especially in light of official propaganda—and the institutional failures that placed the whole of Sinai under Israeli control.
  • slogans shouted and scrawled on building walls that demanded: “Stop the Rule of the Intelligence,” “Down with the Police State,” and “Down with Heikal’s Lying Press.”
  • Heikal blurred the line between the role of a journalist and that of a politician. “He introduced a model in Egypt and the Arab world about what your ambitions should be as a journalist. In the West or Europe, you gain your reputation from your independence as a journalist,” explained Dawoud. “When I am the president’s consultant and I attend his close meetings and I write his speeches, there is definitely a lot of information that I would have to keep secret. That goes contrary to my job as a journalist, which is to find as much information as I can.”
  • “A centralized editorial secretariat, called the Desk, was founded, as well as the Center for Strategic Studies and the Information Division. To his detractors, these innovations appeared to be spying sessions of an extensive empire dedicated to intelligence gathering
  • Nasser appointed Heikal to the post of minister of information and national guidance, a role he assumed for six months in 1970 until Nasser’s death. Yet the self-described journalist confided his frustration of being assigned a ministerial post, perhaps intended to distance him from the publishing empire he built, to a colleague, the leftist writer Lutfi al-Khouli, at his home. The encounter was surreptitiously recorded by the secret police, leading to the arrest and brief imprisonment of al-Khouli, and Heikal’s secretary and her husband, who were also present. “Now, Nasser’s regime had two aspects: it had great achievements to its credit but also it had a repressive side. I do not myself believe that the achievements . . . could have been carried out without some degree of enforcement,” Heikal wrote in The Road to Ramadan. “But after the 1967 defeat the positive achievements came to an end, because all resources were geared to the coming battle, while repression became more obvious. When Nasser died the executants of repression took it on themselves to be the ideologues of the new regime as well. They held almost all the key posts in the country. The people resented this and came to hate what they saw as their oppressors.”
  • after his increasing criticism of Sadat’s handling of the October 1973 War and appeals to the United States to address the impasse, Heikal was removed from al-Ahram in 1974. He remained a prolific author. In May 1978, Heikal was one of dozens of writers accused by the state prosecutor of defaming Egypt and weakening social peace and was subject to an interrogation that extended three months
  • Sadat attempted to bring the dissident cacophony into line through the mass arrest in September 1981 of more than 1,500 intellectuals, writers, journalists, and opposition elements of every stripe. Among those arrested were leading members of the Journalists’ Syndicate and prominent figures like the political writer Muhammad Hassanein Heikal and novelist Nawal El Saadawi. Sadat’s crackdown against his opponents culminated in his assassination by Islamic militants on October 6, 1981 during a military parade to commemorate the start of the 1973 War. Soon after Hosni Mubarak assumed power, Heikal was released from prison
  • When Dream aired the lecture Heikal gave at the American University in Cairo, direct pressure was placed on the owner’s business interests, and the veteran journalist found a new forum on pan-Arab satellite broadcasting. The influential writer has made opposition to Gamal Mubarak’s succession a staple of his newspaper columns.
  • With the rise of satellite television, Qatar’s Al Jazeera commanded audiences not only with news but with popular discussion programmed, like Ma‘ Heikal (With Heikal), a program by Heikal that began the year after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and which was watched by the Arab public with eager interest. Seated behind a desk and looking into the camera, Heikal gave his narrative of historical events and commentary on Middle Eastern and world affairs, exposing the intrigues of regional and global powers from his perch, having privileged access to leaders, diplomats, and decision makers. He has been a critic of Saudi diplomacy, its ballooning regional influence given the power of petrodollars, and its confrontation with Iran. Saudi pundits have consistently taken potshots at Heikal.
  • A couple of months before Morsi’s ouster on July 3, 2013, Heikal was contacted by Morsi’s defense minister Abd al-Fattah al-Sisi for a meeting, which had led to speculation that the Heikal devised the behind-the-scenes scenarios for an elected president’s removal as the dominant political player, the Muslim Brotherhood, was sinking in popularity. After Morsi was expelled from office, Heikal suggested to the military leader that he seek a popular mandate to lead the country, mirroring Nasser-style populism. Attired in full military regalia, al-Sisi at a July 24, 2013 graduation ceremony of the naval and air defence academies, broadcast live, warned that national security was in peril and summoned nationwide rallies two days later. Heikal supported al-Sisi’s bid for the presidency viewing him as the candidate born of necessity.
Ed Webb

Turkish newspaper with policemen 'playing editor' - 0 views

  • Mustafa Edib has been working as a journalist for years and prides himself on fighting for the rights of the marginalized.In 2009, he publicly defended President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) when it faced a closure trial for alleged violation of the state’s secular principles. He has no regrets about helping to preserve a political force that would one day snub out his own voice, “because back then, AKP was being oppressed, and we stand against all types of tyranny”.
  • the closure of numerous other media outlets has raised concerns about a wider political crackdown on media freedoms
  • When Edib, the newspaper’s foreign editor, showed up to work on the morning after the seizure, his office resembled a police barracks. He told Middle East Eye that the Internet connection had been disabled and the paper was already prepared, but that he “didn't know where or by whom, quite frankly”.
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  • Reporter Zeynep Karatas said she was shocked when her story about police brutality during Women's Day demonstrations was replaced with an article about the inauguration of a new steel bridge.
  • Zaman’s circulation numbers fell from 600,000 to 18. This has been a bittersweet victory for Edib, who views the boycott by readers as a show of solidarity and passive resistance. Yet the newspaper he loves is being strangled before his eyes.Employees wonder why they are putting together a newspaper that is never going to print and is expected to be read by only 18 people. In spite of this, many of them are refusing to abandon ship.
  • Zaman's journalists are working under heavy police surveillance.“There must be at least 30 to 40 policemen inside our headquarters in Istanbul who are playing 'editor',”
  •  “I was giving an interview to a Singapore-based TV channel in a public park next to the building and a policeman approached me, took my name and told his superiors I was talking to foreign media,”
  • On Thursday, the new administration deleted the paper's digital archives, removing thousands of articles, including those of Haaretz reporter Louis Fishman.
  • "It is out of the question for either me or any of my colleagues to interfere in this process," Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said.Edib disagrees. He said the deletion of Zaman’s archives was a political move to damage the paper's legacy and remove all traces of critical opinion from its records. “Every day there has been a new Zaman on the shelves, but I feel no part in it, nor do any of my colleagues, since we have nothing to do with the editorial line, story choice or layout,” he said.Those were his last words before our telephone conversation was interrupted by a police officer.
  • According to Aykan Erdemir, a former member of Turkish Parliament now serving as a senior fellow at the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies, the evolution of Erdogan's “disciplinary technologies” paints a startling picture of media control in Turkey.
  • “Erdogan's control over the media cannot be explained just by the fight between him and Fethullah Gulen. This is a bigger issue,” Gul said. He has concerns about how far Erdogan might go in order to silence opposition in the run-up to a referendum on the presidential system.  “Voices, that express discomfort (regarding Erdogan's presidential model), even within his own party, are being smeared and silenced.”
  • In this climate, Aykan said he wouldn’t be surprised if the remaining independent media outlets begin to “willingly” promote the virtues of Erdogan’s executive presidential system.
  • he feels a lack of solidarity from Turkish journalists and the international community
  • Two days after the newspaper takeover, the Turkish government was greeted in Brussels with billions in aid and renewed prospects of joining the EU for their help in resolving Europe’s migrant crisis, which critics say indicates the relative weakness of the EU's negotiating power.Edib and Akarcesme said they felt disappointed, if not betrayed, by the EU appeasing Turkey in exchange for cooperation in curbing Syrian refugees. Brussels is only validating Erdogan's image, power and popularity at home, they said.
Ed Webb

Upcoming elections could make or break Tunisia's fledgling free press - Committee to Pr... - 0 views

  • Tunisia has secured greater press freedom than many of the Arab Spring countries, but local journalists told CPJ that with elections slated for this year, challenges including funding, transparency, and government pressure remain
  • Despite a ban on foreign funding, many of the independent journalists who spoke with CPJ said they believe Gulf money is secretly pouring in to campaigns, although they often lack the means to expose it. Businessmen and politicians are also using privately owned media companies and the government is harnessing public broadcasters to further their political agendas.
  • Journalists speak privately of money from the United Arab Emirates flowing to establishment politicians and funds from Qatar to Islamists but there is little published evidence of this.
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  • Broadcast regulator HAICA (the Independent High Authority of Audiovisual Communication) pulled the license of privately owned TV channel Nesma in July 2018, for pushing the political agenda of its owner Nabil Karoui, who planned to run for president. Police raided the station in April, but the channel is still on the air, only without a license
  • Money still talks loudly in Tunisia where unemployment is officially above 15 percent and many journalists are paid badly.
  • Reporters are hampered in their watchdog role by the government too, especially if they cover national security or police beats. In January last year, Interior Minister Lotfi Brahem admitted during a parliamentary hearing that Tunisian journalists were monitored and that he had even authorized the wiretapping of a French journalist covering unrest.
  • Tunisia has a world class right to information law on the books but Mekki said her attempts to get the Interior Ministry to disclose details of travel bans imposed on hundreds of young Tunisians have been stonewalled
  • a lack of transparency around media ownership, undisclosed campaign contributions to candidates and the use of public resources and public media by the current government to promote partisan agendas are challenges to independent media coverage.
  • "In Tunisia we have a unique situation where we have a weak government, weak political parties but strong civil society, which can work to guarantee the democratic transition overall and with that, press freedom gains,"
Ed Webb

Calls in Egypt for censored social media after arrests of TikTok star, belly dancer - R... - 0 views

  • Egyptian lawmakers have called for stricter surveillance of women on video sharing apps after the arrests of a popular social media influencer and a well-known belly dancer on charges of debauchery and inciting immorality.
  • Instagram and TikTok influencer Haneen Hossam, 20, is under 15 days detention for a post encouraging women to broadcast videos in exchange for money, while dancer Sama el-Masry faces 15 days detention for posting “indecent” photos and videos.
  • “Because of a lack of surveillance some people are exploiting these apps in a manner that violates public morals and Egypt’s customs and traditions,”
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  • Hossam denied any wrongdoing but Cairo University - where she is studying archaeology - said it would enforce maximum penalties against her which could include expulsion.
  • Several women in Egypt have previously been accused of “inciting debauchery” by challenging the country’s conservative social norms, including actress Rania Youssef after critics took against her choice of dress for the Cairo Film Festival in 2018.
  • In 2018 Egypt adopted a cyber crime law that grants the government full authority to censor the internet and exercise communication surveillance. A media regulation law also allows authorities to block individual social media accounts.
  • Egyptian women’s rights campaigner Ghadeer Ahmed blamed the arrests on rising social pressures on women and “corrupt laws”. “[These laws] condemn people for their behaviour that may not conform to imagined social standards for how to be a ‘good citizen’ and a respectful woman,” she wrote in a Tweet.
Ed Webb

President's eldest son, Mahmoud al-Sisi, sidelined from powerful intelligence position ... - 0 views

  • Mahmoud al-Sisi, President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s son and a senior official in the powerful General Intelligence Service (GIS), is being reassigned to a long-term position at Egypt’s diplomatic delegation in Moscow
  • perception within the president’s inner circle that Mahmoud al-Sisi has failed to properly handle a number of his responsibilities and that his increasingly visible influence in the upper decision-making levels of government is having a negative impact on his father’s image
  • suggestion that the president’s son be sidelined also came from senior government figures in the United Arab Emirates, a close and influential ally of Egypt, who view Mahmoud al-Sisi’s role as having become damaging to the president
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  • Russia seemed like an appropriate choice due to its close relations with Egypt, as well as the longstanding admiration among many senior Egyptian officials for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s style of governance
  • Among the primary reasons for sending Mahmoud al-Sisi to Moscow was his failure to properly handle most of the responsibilities assigned to him, according to the GIS sources. Chief among them was the media, over which he has exercised direct control for more than a year. In 2017, the GIS began to exert direct control over the media through acquisition, purchasing a controlling stake in the Egyptian Media Group, the biggest media conglomerate in Egypt. The corporation has several influential newspapers and television outlets under its control, including ONtv and the Youm7 newspaper. GIS also owns the DMC television network. Yet during Mahmoud al-Sisi’s tenure, the president has been unsatisfied with the media’s performance to the extent that he publicly criticized local media coverage on several occasions, one GIS official said.
  • A number of informed sources told Mada Masr at the time that, on the president’s orders, Mahmoud al-Sisi oversaw the fierce crackdown that followed the protests, with over 4,000 people arrested, including prominent activists, lawyers, university professors, and political opposition figures. At the time, the president was in New York to take part in the UN General Assembly on the advice of his closest aides, particularly Abbas, a longtime confidant of the president and current head of GIS.
  • Sending Mahmoud al-Sisi to Moscow will also help alleviate growing tensions within GIS about the role of the president’s son in the removal of senior officials from their posts in the intelligence apparatus since the president formally came to power in 2014
  • The process of removing senior members of the GIS came under the pretext that they were “Omar Suleiman’s men” (the late intelligence chief under Mubarak) who had no loyalty to the “new state.”
  • “I think that President Sisi knows very well that there is a general state of dissatisfaction within governmental institutions. There are considerable worries inside the state apparatus that cannot be underestimated,” the source close to Abu Dhabi’s decision-making circles said. “I think he understands that his popularity on the streets has declined for various reasons, some of which are economic, while others are rooted in social and political grievances. Besides, the wound inflicted by his handover of Tiran and Sanafir to Saudi Arabia three years ago has not healed. Sisi will certainly not ignore the growing signs of anger altogether.”
  • The new Russia post may instead be an attempt to hone his skills by becoming a military envoy in a country of great strategic importance to Egypt, including in its role in constructing a nuclear power plant in Dabaa.
  • His two siblings include Mustafa, who works in the Administrative Control Authority, and Hassan, who moved from the oil sector to a GIS position nearly three years ago.
  • “The advice was that the son should not cast a shadow over the president’s position, so that the situation of Hosni and Gamal Mubarak is not repeated.”
Ed Webb

'Where Tunisia Leads, Britain Follows' - Byline Times - 0 views

  • Fuelled by populist politics, a nationalistic press and the apparent desire to confront complex problems with ‘red meat’ and increased nationalism, Tunisia’s President has steered his country on a dark course.
  • rather than address the core problems facing Tunisia, its President – buoyed by a supportive media – has embarked on a populist witch-hunt of his political opponents and now one of the country’s most vulnerable groups. 
  • many acknowledge their fresh of support for the President since his crackdown.  Asked about the 21,000 or so black migrants residing in Tunisia, no one here is racist, they say – they simply want to distinguish between those who are here legally and illegally. It sounds reasonable enough. In fact, it could probably pass for small talk at a Conservative Party fundraiser. However, at least in Tunisia, that reasonableness fades when pressed. “They’re selling cocaine, they’re selling their wives and their girlfriends to each other,” Bassem, a fruit and vegetable wholesaler, told me. “They’re even buying boats and taking still more migrants to Europe.” In this part of Ariana, every Tunisian has a lurid tale, always experienced at one remove, which they reel off as ‘proof’ of the criminality of the country’s black migrant population.
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  • As the UK Government focuses its efforts on pushing through an immigration bill that it itself admits has only a 50% chance of meeting international legal thresholds, there are parallels between both sets of leaderships. Like Tunisia’s President, Rishi Sunak Government is attempting to use populist nationalism and the wilful demonising of migrants as cover for its own gross economic mismanagement and flailing popularity.
  • To date, none of these stories are troubling Tunisia’s mainstream media, which appears more focused on defending Tunisia’s national image and parroting the President’s attack lines than delivering facts to a public growing increasingly hostile to the unwarranted international condemnation it feels itself subject to.
  • the UK’s established media has spent the past week fixated on the employment terms of a BBC sports commentator than scrutinising a law that stands to make the lives of tens of thousands of people immeasurably worse.
  • Just as the UK media is yet to truly reckon with the financial impact of Brexit on the country’s poorest, so the Tunisian media is unwilling to fully address the consequences of the suspension of the World Bank partnership and the increasing uncertainty surrounding a sorely needed IMF bail-out. 
Ed Webb

Survey reveals growing public apprehension over democratic process - 0 views

  • almost half of respondents (49.9 percent) said the government is moving toward an authoritarian and repressive style of governance, while 36 percent said the government is progressing on further democratization; 14.2 percent did not respond or said they do not have any opinion on that issue
  • 49.7 percent of respondents said they have no concerns about revealing their political views, while 46.7 percent said they are worried about expressing their views
  • The majority of those surveyed also said they believe the press is not free in Turkey, with 53.3 percent versus 41.1 percent.
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  • AK Party is still the most popular party among the electorate, and if elections were held tomorrow, it would still lead the polls
  • Government claims that external forces, terror groups, provocateurs and social media actually instigated protests were not found to be credible by most respondents. Only 3.2 percent of respondents said unidentified external or internal powers were behind the protests, while 1.8 percent said provocateurs and instigators provoked the protests. Those who believe media or social media were behind the incidents ranked lowest in the survey with 0.6 percent.
  • a majority of those who said they voted for the ruling AK Party were against the building plans; 41.6 percent of people who voted for the AK Party in the June 2011 elections said they opposed the government plans, while 38.3 of AK Party supporters said they favor the plans
  • 62.1 percent of respondents said the media did not cover events fairly
  • the public's support for the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party) has come down some 11 percent in June 2013 compared to the same month a year ago, while the popularity of Erdoğan took a blow with a 7 percent drop in his popularity in just a month. Most people see Erdoğan's tone as harsh and confrontational. The government's Syrian policy remains unpopular as well
  • 54.2 percent saying that they oppose the Syrian policy, while only 27.4 percent favor the government position
  • Half of surveyed individuals (49.9 percent) were against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's staying in power, however, while only 6.2 percent said they favored him staying; 43.9 percent said they did not care about Assad's prospects one way or another
  • Almost 43 percent said Turkey should not switch to a presidential system, with 30.9 percent declaring their support for a presidential system. In April polling data by MetroPOLL, support for a presidential system was 35.2 percent
  • 41.7 percent said Turkey needs a new political party
  • 72.5 percent of the respondents said they like President Abdullah Gül most among existing political figures. Gül was followed by Erdoğan with 53.5 percent, Kılıçdaroğlu 26.7 percent and Devlet Bahçeli 29.3 percent. Erdoğan lost almost 7 percentage points from the April poll conducted by MetroPOLL
  • The margin of error for the overall poll is 2 percentage points, and the confidence level is 95 percent
Ed Webb

What's behind calls to close Shiite media outlets in Egypt? - 0 views

  • In October 2016, lawyer Samir Sabri filed a lawsuit before the Second Circuit of the Administrative Judiciary Court, demanding that Shiite media outlets and websites be shut down in Egypt
  • “It is unacceptable and unreasonable to have a media platform in Egypt promoting Shiite ideology. Egypt is an Islamic state and the main source of legislation is Sharia under the constitution, which recognizes Christianity and Judaism to be monotheistic. El-Nafis is one of the news websites inciting against Saudi Arabia, Al-Azhar and the Ministry of Awqaf, where Ahmad Rasem al-Nafis attacks in his articles the Sunnis and Saudi Arabia and calls for professing the Shiite faith.”
  • “The Salafist leaders’ Wahhabism was behind the dissemination of extremism in Syria and Yemen. Shiite channels and websites in Egypt do not advocate extremism or renounce any ideology or doctrine. They call for dealing with the Shiites as Muslims at a time when Salafist movements claim that Shiites are non-Muslims.”
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  • “The legal criteria in shutting down any station would be based on its content and on whether or not it is viewed as blasphemy or incitement against any religion or belief."
  • “Shiite channels have been operating for years and have not caused strife or crises that Salafist channels ignite. This is because Shiite channels do not incite to violence and bloodshed and do not declare others to be infidels.”
  • Human rights activist and lawyer at the Association for Freedom of Thought and Expression, Ahmed Ezzat, told Deutsche Welle in 2012 that the law does not criminalize embracing or promoting the Shiite faith. Shutting down any Shiite channel or prosecuting any promoter of the Shiite ideology would be based on a broad application of the law against blasphemy of religions, he said.
  • “some Salafist channels, such as al-Hafez and al-Nas, were shut down in 2013.”
  • “What is happening is a part of the chaotic media and religious discourse. There are 121 religious channels broadcasting via Nilesat, including more than 60 Shiite channels, some of which explain Shiite ideas in a moderate way," he said. "Others are extremist and incite against the Sunni sect. Sunni channels respond also to such incitement with counterincitement. Thus, all extremist channels — be they Shiite or Sunni — need to be taken down.”
  • many Shiite channels are not at loggerheads with the state institutions, but rather with some Salafist parties.
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