Media in Middle East & North Africa

“Only 10 percent of Syrians working in state media believe that. Another 10 percent sympathize with the people. The rest keep silent because they fear for their lives and do not want to lose their jobs.”

Malathi added that he and other people working in state media took part in promoting the regime’s lies which revolved around foreign agendas and Islamist plots to undermine the state as well as slam satellite channels for saying the truth.

Il est donc inquiétant de constater que les juges se sont basés sur une perception morale subjective et une méconnaissance du dossier et de la situation propre au web au lieu de se baser sur ce que dit la loi. Pire encore, la justice tunisienne dans un élan d’absurdité a transféré son pouvoir décisionnaire et exécutif à l’ATI pour lister les sites à caractère pornographique et les censurer.

Il est clair que ce sont les enfants qui sont les plus concernés par ce filtrage dans un but de protection. Mais est-ce la bonne solution d’interdire au lieu de prévenir ? De censurer au lieu d’éduquer ? De jeter tout cet argent par la fenêtre au lieu de l’investir dans la construction d’écoles dans les régions défavorisées ?

"The decision to ban (the paper) was made on the basis of article 29 of the press code" that protects the monarch, the senior communication ministry official said on Saturday.

the first time that a foreign publication was banned for the stated reasons since the moderate Islamist Justice and Development Party (PJD) came to power in Morocco in January,

maintenance of the pre-revolutionary media landscape: No new TV station has been allowed. Just as no daily newspaper has emerged. New titles are edited by political parties and appear as weeklies, most of which incorporate the standard of the tabloid press. After a 9-days hunger strike by Radio Kalima’s manager, Omar Mistiri, twelve regional radios out of 74 candidates were finally selected in late June by the National Authority for Information and Communication Reform (INRIC), a temporary media advisory board. Now, the selected radios are waiting for the governmental permission. At the institutional level, the disappearance of the Communication Ministry does not lead, right now, to more media autonomy. Pre-revolutionary media managers are mainly the same: CEOs, Editors and Chairmen of Board moved from flattery of the ousted president and his system to a doubtful celebration of the “revolution”. In the state-owned media, the turnover of managers is conducted without any transparency just like under the dictatorship. Changes look more like a consequence of power balance between the different clans in the current government than a nascent process towards a democratic media system.

field reporting, which was longtime banned from or depreciated in the official media

The legal status of old private media, especially those belonging to the former president family, is still unclear. Some of them are under jurisdictional managers, but INRIC excluded them for the moment from any ethical obligations. Hannibal TV, owned by a relative to Leila Trabelsi, was involved in many ethical infringements to the Ethical Code like slandering or fake news, before and particularly after the revolution. Larbi Nasra, the Hanibal TV owner, seems to play a political role by receiving political leaders and airing many reports about his own charitable actions. Fethi Houidi, Information Minister under Ben Ali, is still Nessma TV’s CEO. Moez Sinaoui, former Nessma PR man, was nominated as the Interim Prime Minister’s spokesman

Six dissident journalists and crew members calling for media freedoms within state-run TV were referred to investigation Sunday upon orders by the minister of information, who also filed complaints to the prosecutor. In addition to the internal investigation, Information Minister Ahmed Anis accused the six of vandalism, endangering national security, and disrupting the work process in a complaint to the Prosecutor General’s office, according to TV director Abdellatif Abou Hemela.

they aired a rerun of an old episode instead of the live show, since we were protesting in front of the show's studio. They feared that our voices could be heard if the show was on air,

a director in the Nile News channel, Ihab El-Mergawy, who raised a banner that said: "Freedom for Nile News Channel," which was visible from the glass behind the anchor of "Al-Mash-had" (The View). El-Mergawy was suspended for two weeks and referred to Maspero's internal investigations office as Anis accused him of storming the studio, disrupting the work process and squandering public funds, according to a statement published by Association of Freedom of Thought and Expression (AFTE).

Over the last year, the Bahraini government has been scaling up its information control apparatus and media access to the country is rigorously monitored and managed by the government and its team of Western PR advisors.

'Social media' conjures up thoughts of instant internet communication, global chatter over the web, computers, mobiles, tweets, posts etc. But there is a communication form that predates these modern tools - political street art. Street art can be dated back to ancient Egypt and throughout history it has been employed by those with a political point to make. From the outset of the Arab uprisings, people from Egypt to Libya have been enjoying their newfound freedom of expression, taking to the walls to say what they want to say. In this week's feature, Listening Post's Meenakshi Ravi looks at a communication form that is for the people, by the people.

As we can see from these estimates below, the volume of Syria-related tweets (as a percentage of overall tweets) appears considerably lower than the volume related to the uprisings in Egypt and Iran. The estimates were constructed using multiple published Web sources reporting on number of tweets for the observed events as well as total Twitter traffic over time, including Twitter's blog, Customer Insight Group, Mashable, the Sysomos blog, and a dataset acquired via Twapperkeeper.

The Iranian protests in 2009 marked the first time that social media let us witness this kind of protest in a closed society from the citizens' point of view. The world watched, transfixed, as the death of protester Neda Agha-Soltan was caught on video. Now, these kinds of horrifying images have become alarmingly common.

The revolution in Egypt was relatively short, fast, and explosive. The Syrian uprising, by contrast, has been going on for 11 long months. Certain moments have refocused the world's attention, such as the siege of Homs in early February or the deaths of journalists Anthony Shadid, Marie Colvin, and Rémi Ochlik. Otherwise, much of the Syrian uprising has tragically resembled, as NPR's Andy Carvin puts it, "the proverbial boiling of the frog." While Carvin and others have been devotedly tweeting about Syria, he acknowledges that the length of the uprising might deter some news coverage. "I could imagine editors saying, what's the new angle here?" he says.

"Most of the people who come to Tahrir already know what is going on there. We need to reach the people who don't know, and are getting their information from Scaf-controlled state media."

With no co-ordinators or hierarchy to the Kazeboon campaign, it is difficult to keep track of the number of screenings now taking place, but an online calendar of events used by Egyptian activists suggests dozens are happening across the country every day.

"There has been a consistent effort [by the regime] to discredit undermine and distort the image of everyone who supports the Tahrir Square protests," she says. "The Kazeboon campaign means you are able to reach as many people as possible and show that you're not thugs." "As the screenings are typically organised by locals, it gives it more credibility among the neighbourhood residents,"

Many were too immersed in the daily struggles to tolerate criticism or contradictory points of view. Many others welcomed observations and comments coming from participants who were able to make connections with other historical moments, and to discern patterns or conjunctions that helped to shed light on current events. Enthusiasm, rigorous analysis, heightened emotions, tears, serious reflections, and “a feel of the revolutionary spirit,” in the words of one participant, permeated the proceedings.

Amongst the objections voiced was that it was Euro-centric because it framed the protests with reference to a European precedent, the Prague spring; it implied Arab stasis preceding the coming of spring; it predicted imminent decline as spring is bound to be followed by autumn. Debates over the phrase “Arab spring” encapsulate the overriding theme of the conference: the conflicting narratives of and about the Arab revolutions and the geopolitics of these narratives were put at the centre of debates and analysis.

“Peacefulness” is fetishised reinforcing the premise that the state is the sole legitimate entity entitled to the use of violence, a premise challenged by the revolutionary project.

The media world's fetishization of social media has reached idol-worshipping proportions. Media conference agendas are filled with panels devoted to social media and how to use social tools to amplify coverage, but you rarely see one discussing what that coverage should actually be about. As Wadah Khanfar, former Director General of Al Jazeera, told our editors when he visited our newsroom last week, "The lack of contextualization and prioritization in the U.S. media makes it harder to know what the most important story is at any given time."

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Jridet announced his intentions to start the hunger strike on May 3, on the occasion of the World Press Freedom Day, and asserted that unfair distribution of paid public advertisements and other announcements was the main reason for the the action. “Favoritism, party affiliation, and political loyalty are still governing the process of attribution of public advertisements,” he said.

After the revolution, the ATCE was abolished and no other body was created to take over the allocation of public announcements to different media outlets. “Today, we are back to same old practices of the ATCE…The most obvious example is that Al Fajr, [the newspaper of the Ennahdha Party] takes a larger share of public ads, and needless to ask about why,” Jridet told Tunisia Live

report charged the media advertising sector in Tunisia with “complete absence of ethical rules and codes of conduct.”

Tim Sebastian, journalist and head of the New Arab Debates, announced during a press conference today that the Ministry of the Interior has assured him that they did not direct police officers to gather information about the attendees of the May 29 debate. During the debate, which took place at the Institute of Cultural Heritage in Tunis’s old city, two policemen allegedly asked a Tunisian staff member of the New Arab Debates team for the list of attendees at the event, claiming that they were acting on “orders from superiors.” The New Arab Debates team announced the suspension of their activities in Tunis as a sign of protest against the incident.

“We thought we just acquired freedom of speech. If they’re trying to intimidate us with such acts, we shouldn’t remain silent,”

“What matters the most for us is the reputation of Tunisia. Excuses such as ‘orders from superiors’ are tools of the old regime,”

A defence lawyer in Kuwait says a court has sentenced a man to ten years in prison for Twitter posts deemed insulting to Islam and to the rulers of Gulf allies Saudi Arabia and Bahrain

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

Brick later apologized for releasing the video, claiming to be very “emotional and drunk.”

Social media connected these young Arabs to like-minded individuals, across the region, and beyond, but perhaps most importantly with the media -- highlighting the limitations of parachute journalism, which is as ineffective as it is costly. Instead, it offered them a new source for news-gathering, social-media

Despite social media's challenging of the state's intimidation and targeting of journalists, Bahrain, Syria, and Egypt and many others continue to crackdown on dissent. But through citizen reports and mobilization on social media, their stories could not be suppressed.

Twitter alone has changed the way we, as global citizens, communicate and the way wars are covered, especially when governments ban journalists from entry to the country. Twitter ultimately becomes the wires

Bettibi announced that he got his cameras back under an initiative from the presidency a few days after he began the hunger strike. “It is not because of the cameras that I started the hunger strike, but because of the principles that we stand for and we are fighting for,” explained Bettibi. Members of the Constituent Assembly requested the bloggers to suspend their strike, saying that they would take up the activists’ cause. Among the representatives supporting Bettibi’s case were Samir Betaib, Abderraouf Ayadi, Karima Souid, and Mahmoud Baroudi.

Bettibi said that he and the other bloggers initiated the hunger strike to fight for the people’s right to know the truth about the trial. “We demand to know the truth, it is every Tunisian’s right to know the truth about who killed the protesters and who gave the order to shoot people,” he said. He also added that the trials should be open to the public. “It is every Tunisian’s right to see what is happening inside the court and know the truth,”