Media in Middle East & North Africa

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.

Tajikistan’s government has blocked the websites of the British Broadcasting Corporation and Russian TV channel Vesti, local internet providers told RIA Novosti on Monday. “The decision has been taken by the Governmental Communications Service,”

Experts link the move to a controversial armed conflict in the east of the republic that took place on July 24. At least nine Tajik security officers were killed and another 25 others injured in a special operation in Tajikistan’s eastern city of Khorog against a mafia-style group believed to be behind the murder of a top Tajik security general, Abdullo Nazarov. Dushanbe denies any casualties among civilians, but the opposition media reported some 200 dead, including security officers and civilians.

pretext for an ethnic cleansing campaign

The student also suggested that the "media blackout" on the show could be intentional, “given the ongoing wave of criticism of Morsi by state-owned media outlets.”

Morsi’s spokesman Yasser Ali stated that the presidential office has filed law suits against two media outlets – which he did not name – for publishing false news concerning the president.

Morsi gives broad answers to pre-recorded short questions in a clear attempt to reassure listeners that a better time for Egypt is yet to come

a new bill that would ban blasphemy in Tunisia. The draft bill, proposed to the Constituent Assembly on Wednesday by Tunisia’s ruling moderate Islamist party Ennahdha, would criminalize “insults, profanity, derision, and representation of Allah and Mohammed.”

” If passed, the draft law would punish such violations of “sacred values” with prison terms of up to two years and fines of up to 2,000 dinars (U.S. $1,236) through an additional article to the Tunisian Penal Code.

Mrad justified the bill’s proposal by explaining that the protection of religious symbols does not inherently represent an attack on freedom of expression. “In all societies, you will always find limits and things that you cannot say,” he said, adding, “We [Ennahdha] are committed to granting freedom of expression, but this law is just to set limits for this freedom.”

"Cyber attacks are the new reality of modern warfare," said Hayat Alvi, lecturer in Middle Eastern studies at the US Naval War College. "We can expect more... from all directions. In war, the greatest casualty is the truth. Each side will try to manipulate information to make their own side look like it is gaining while the other is losing."

In April, Saudi-based broadcaster Al Arabiya briefly lost control of one of its twitter accounts, which was then used to spread a string of stories suggesting a political crisis in Qatar. Tweets included claims that the Qatari prime minister had been sacked, his daughter arrested in London and that a coup orchestrated by the army chief was underway.

there seems little sign such incidents made a significant difference either on the ground in Syria or to the wider geopolitical picture

Ghannouchi also dismissed the importance some media and opposition groups attached to a proposed article in the new constitution which refers to the "complementarity" of women to men, rather than their equality. "Some MPs [in the National Constituent Assembly] have seen in this phrase some sort of retreat on fundamental principles like equality, on which there is a consensus between Ennahda and its main coalition partners,"

Ennahda has been heavily criticized by some civil society and opposition groups for seeking to curtail freedom of expression, most recently with a draft law to criminalize offences against "sacred values" that could carry a jail term of up to four years.

The editor of Morocco's Al-Ahdath Al-Maghribia daily newspaper, Moktar el-Ghzioui, is living in fear for his life after he expressed support for pre-marital sex during a local television debate. "The next thing there was a cleric from Oujda releasing a fatwa that I should die," he says.

Critics of the Islamists argue that the strict sex laws merely increase the harassment of women.

Imam Hassan Ait Belaid who preaches at a mosque in the commercial capital Casablanca says article 490 is part of the culture of a non-Western society. "If the code is removed, we will become wild savages. Our society will become a disaster," he says.

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

all this high-level politicking has completely obfuscated Morsi’s assault on freedom of expression, with the closing of a (repulsive and incendiary, but still) TV channel, the investigation of a newspaper on charges of insulting him, and the appointment of Brotherhood sympathisers to chief editorial positions in state-owned newspapers.

The performance displayed the fear, the doubt, and the waning of faith that materialised in the months that followed the stepping down of former president Hosni Mubarak. “Stories of unity and diversity seem like a ridiculous memory now,”

This performance at Left Bank featured memories from the battle in Mohamed Mahmoud Street last November, the December clashes at the cabinet sit in, and the February football match massacre in Port Said.

Over the 30 years leading up to the 2011 popular uprising, state media took its cue from Hosni Mubarak's gatekeeper, the diminutive but terrifying Safwat el-Sherif, former minister of information. Post January 25, state media and papers backed the Supreme Council of Armed Forces (SCAF), the country's ruling military council. Last week, in a nod to the democratic process, it was the turn of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB). Egypt's upper house of parliament, the Shura Council, announced the appointments of the new editors, setting off a storm of angry protest among journalists, led by the Journalists' Syndicate, who insisted that the Islamist-dominated council had essentially rigged the selection process and assigned their own men to do its bidding.

Traditionally the ranks of the Brotherhood have held professionals including doctors, lawyers, engineers, and teachers. They count precious few artists, columnists, or authors in their fold and as a result tend to be significantly more underrepresented than other political parties. Apparently, they've taken it to heart. Salah Eissa, the assistant secretary general of the syndicate told the Egypt Independent in June that the FJP's paper had recently published several articles that spoke of "purging the press of liberals and leftists."

The appointments were followed by a rash of blank editorial pages in national newspapers, a favored means of protest. One of the most prominent protesters was Gamal Fahmy, whose column in in Al-Tahrir newspaper simply read: "This space is blank to protest the hereditary system that did not fall with the ousting of Mubarak and his son. It seems that the Muslim Brotherhood is trying to revive it after it was blinded by arrogance. This protest is against their control of the public owned media."

“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,”

how the young enacted their citizenship in the digital age as a way to both confront power and imagine a different future

While the economic benefits of globalization had bypassed the Middle East’s young generation, the information revolution did not (at least not to the urban centres). The children submerged in the information technology of the 1990s onwards are today’s youth.

El-Sharnouby analysed Egyptian news sources since the turn of twenty-first the century to examine how the government sought to accommodate the "youth bulge." The Mubarak government conceived of youth as prone to laziness and passivity. Moreover, El-Sharnouby highlights that many scholars erroneously thought that disenfranchised youth would turn either to drug abuse or religious extremism. It therefore came as a surprise to them when scores of the “problematic,” “apathetic” and “lazy” youth were the main actors and agents of dissent in the January 25 revolution

Touir asserted that the new appointed committee would still incorporate the beneficial aspects of decrees 115 and 116. “Law decrees 115 and 116 contain positive points that will be used. However, there are also negative points that need to be changed, including the law that assigns a prison term for journalists. We are against this law,” he said.

current status of various constitutional controversies, such as the status of women, the criminalization of blasphemy, the creation of a government-appointed media regulatory committee, and the system for electing the president

multi-party support will be necessary to pass these articles

it remains disputed whether the president will be elected by the people or by the parliament

“Before the revolution Touati had a pro-Ben Ali editorial line, which showed in the columns that he wrote. Now he is absolutely pro-Ennahdha,”

“I think that we should judge the political intention behind these appointments. It is a strategy to strike down press freedom again. We need reform and not manipulation of the media,”

“I am here to support freedom of the press. We suffered from the same issue, with press being controlled, during the regime of Ben Ali. Now the government is resorting to the same practices once again,”

“Social media is a positive asset to Tunisian media. It is a source of information for the Tunisian people and the most trusted source of news,” said Hichem Snoussi, a media expert and member of the National Committee of Information and Communication Reform (INRIC). “These sites are the hardest thing for the government to control. Peer-to-peer information sharing destroys the possibility of monopolizing information,” Snoussi continued

“These sites can be bought by people who want influence. They can also foster rumors,” he said.

“Right after the revolution, media regained the trust of Tunisians. The state television channel got 40% of their audience back but now, it’s losing people’s trust again as the government exerts control over the media once more. It’s an issue of trust. People don’t trust traditional sources of news anymore.”

online subscriptions, which Haddad says generated customers from all over the region, with the majority coming from Saudi Arabia