Group items tagged

A Cairo prosecutor has ordered the detention of an Egyptian accused of altering photographs before sending them to the Qatar-based Al Jazeera news network and of belonging to a terrorist organisation

Hassan El Banna is accused of belonging to a terrorist group, an apparent reference to the Brotherhood, and of doctoring pictures to damage the image of security forces

A security source said his movements had been monitored before his arrest and that he had supplied Al Jazeera's Egyptian channel with manipulated photographs, but was not an employee of the channel. A judicial source said he was not a professional photographer and did not officially work for Al Jazeera.

Emad Shahin, a political scientist at the American University in Cairo, said the state media’s attacks on the head of state made the situation perfectly clear: Mr. Morsi represented a double threat as the first civilian and the first Islamist to hold the presidency. “This is a deliberate and well-orchestrated campaign to shake Morsi’s image, ensure his failure and frustrate the revolution,” Mr. Shahin said.

Ahmed Abu Baraka, a lawyer for the Muslim Brotherhood, said the issue was deeper than bias. “It is an incurable disease in state media that needs surgery,” he said, blaming 60 years of parroting the ideology of secular dictatorship.

Taghrid Wafi, a state television producer, said she and her colleagues were in “confusion.” “They don’t know who is in charge,” she said, noting that in some ways the military’s grip on the news media had loosened since Mr. Morsi’s election. For the first time, she said, she could interview activists who criticized the military for court-martialing civilians. “You know we don’t work on our own; we need approval for our guests.”

optimism crumbled on Aug. 8 when the Shura Council — the upper house of parliament controlled by Morsy’s Muslim Brotherhood — announced dozens of new editors at a host of state-owned newspapers and magazines. The new al-Ahram editor, Abdel Nasser Salama, was just one of the hires that prompted a widespread revolt among Egyptian journalists

The day after the appointments, a handful of columnists (all at privately owned papers) ran blank columns in protest — objecting to both the individual choices and the idea that Morsy’s government was adopting the Mubarak-era levers of media control. That turned out to be just the opening salvo in a widening conflict that has Morsy’s young government accused of suppressing free speech. A pair of prominent government critics now face charges of incitement to violence and the purely Mubarak-era crime of “insulting the President.” Tawfiq Okasha, a firebrand anti-Brotherhood television host, has had the channel he owns temporarily shut down. And police raided the offices of the privately owned newspaper al-Dostour, confiscated the Aug. 11 edition of the paper and charged its editor in chief, Islam Afify, with incitement.

Kassem still warned that the Brotherhood had already proved itself too prickly and thin-skinned to rule responsibly over a raucous post-Mubarak Egypt. “They’re a quasi-military organization,” he said. “Internally there’s no such thing as criticism of your superiors.”

Katatni confirmed that the FJP appreciates the role of the press and the media as a watchdog to state and government institutions, while keeping in mind the best interests of Egypt and Egyptians who offered huge sacrifices in order to attain their freedom.   He pointed out that rumours circulated by some media outlets during the last few days alleging that the party will close down papers or restrict publications are false. "Such actions are not reflective of the FJP's policies which acknowledge the freedom of press in particular, and basic freedom in all its forms", he stated

journalists accused the Muslim Brotherhood of trying to control the state-run publications by picking editors who will allegedly toe its line. The Shura Council, the nominal owner of these publications, has recently unveiled controversial criteria for editorship of these publications and asked journalists interested in the job to forward applications. Officials in the council have said the aim of the move is to revamp the state-owned press institutions. “The Freedom and Justice Party has replaced [Mubarak’s] National Democratic Party in attempting to dominate the national press,” Yehia Qalash, an ex-member of the Press Syndicate board, told Gulf News. “If the Brothers were really sincere about their call for reforming these intuitions, they would remove these institutions from the Shura Council’s control. In fact, they merely follow in the footsteps of the Mubarak regime,” he added.

The privately owned daily newspaper Al-Dostour is being investigated on charges of insulting President Mohamed Morsy

people accused the newspaper of "fueling sedition," and "harming the president through phrases and wording punishable by law."

press freedom advocates also condemned the raid, saying the Brotherhood was moving to silence its critics

“What’s happening is very serious,” said Hani Shukrallah, the editor of Ahram Online, an English-language site. “We’ve got an organization that is not interested in democratizing the press, or freeing the press,” he said, referring to the Brotherhood. “It’s interested in taking it over.”

He not only preserved the ministry that regulates the media — for many the embodiment of the autocratic state — but also installed a Brotherhood member as its head.

“The legal description of publishing crimes is too broad, and the law of publishing needs revision,”

The president of the association of Egyptian judges said Thursday that they were abandoning their neutrality toward the coming presidential runoff in an effort to guard against an Islamist monopoly of power.

if the group’s members had known Islamists would win most of the seats in Parliament after elections that ended in January, they would not have supervised the voting

the effect of Judge Zend’s appearance was a public pitch for the presidential campaign of Ahmed Shafik, the last prime minister under Mr. Mubarak, who is now squaring off against the Brotherhood’s nominee, Mohamed Morsi