Ed Webb's List: Egypt media 2014

• Social media platforms provide a channel for citizens to report events on the ground in a faster way and without the editorial interference of newspapers’ managements and the state. It is the only completely free and independent outlet to spread information.
• As long as we have a biased, censored media, which is not just in Egypt but any mainstream media, alternative outlets like Twitter and others will be the tools used by the people and activists to expose the truth.

• The role will be that of support group, the way it always has been. It's where you get hope, where you know you have people...who share similar views, no matter what those views are, all over Egypt.

   

    In a society that is bound to be more isolationist due to fear, Twitter provides a safe mechanism to interact and meet like-minded others and find comfort in that. We will need all the comfort we can get.
• it is a consultation and consensus-building platform like no other
• Twitter is more immune to infiltration and/or electronic committees of security apparatus; when someone from them replies to you he/she can't really reach out to others not following him/her, so it's very hard to create a false consensus or dominant opinion as with Facebook comments and the like.
• The infrastructure of Twitter is only mildly conducive to exchange of ideas with people outside of our immediate list of friends; accessing strangers' ideas on a given topic is only a hashtag click away but how often do we do that click? It's more comfortable to only follow discussions among people we've pre-approved.
  
• Since the first revolution we can say that we're seeing more Twitter-conversation than Twitter-organisation. But I predict we'll see more of a reversion to the organisation use at some point, as the battle with the enemies of democracy intensifies.
• We need to market the revolution and in that we'll need to teach ourselves how to conduct a constructive Twitter conversation, one that doesn't end in people blocking each other.
• at the end of the day it's a platform for youth who many times find no other alternative
• It will continue to play an important role in citizen journalism as it has always done, and delivering independent media to counter the official one.
• The revolution and its revolutionaries were badly portrayed and have been subjected to intensive campaigns of defamation, despite all the efforts on social media to provide another narrative and defy the propaganda.
• especially after the start of the revolution, media outlets rely on Twitter to stay on top of events on the ground throughout the major cities in Egypt. In fact, almost all newspapers and TV channels will make daily references to news spread through Twitter one way or the other.
• If many people join Twitter from different classes and groups to represent the Egyptian street, we can discuss for real what the Egyptian people in the street want.

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• Members of the collective see themselves as performing an essential storytelling role: providing coverage of police brutality and filling a media "vacuum".
   
   "There isn't a free media," founder member Omar Hamilton told me during a visit to the collective's workspace in Cairo. "We have to step in where we can to provide alternative narratives, to provide what we would see as the truth that's not being presented."
• "There's nothing you can really do about it except run at the right time. Which is just after everyone else but not before it's too late,"
• The collective formed in the days following the January 2011 uprising when it set up a "human rights media tent" in Tahrir Square as "a point to collect footage that people had of police abuses".
• we needed a space to work out of and to host a library of revolutionary material and to archive everything we can, including mobile phone footage and news-quality material
• Asked whether they see themselves as activists or journalists, Hamilton explained how they have a "definite journalistic push".
   
   "We have a decentralised approach. We don't have an editorial policy, we don't have an editorial meeting at the beginning of the day to tell people where to go."
   
   Anyone can contribute footage, creating an "almost infinite number of camera people" who can be out filming, using mobile phones, DSLRs and hand-held video cameras.
• "We are both attacking state media and trying to push traditional media outlets into taking a stronger stance and backing them up in being able to show things that perhaps felt they were unable to show.
   
   "We are also empowering everyone that has a camera phone to make them feel like they can contribute to a wider narrative rather than just uploading it to YouTube."
• Mosireen is therefore reaching out to those without internet access, which is "one of the big, big, big challenges".
   
   "It's very easy to forget how hyper-connected we are compared to most of the world," Hamilton said
• The citizen journalists have licensed footage under creative commons on YouTube and Vimeo, where others can download the films. These can be used by broadcasters.
• It is not the international audience the activists are focused on. "We are in a fight that is going to be settled, or won or lost, here [in Egypt], so we don't need to spend too much time talking to or addressing international audiences.
   
   "It's really much more about Egyptian public opinion and the narrative within Egypt that is important, and helping people get access to the truth."

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• 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.”
• Morsy’s Egypt has a very different atmosphere than Mubarak’s, and segments of the postrevolutionary population have no intention of giving up such hard-won freedoms. On Aug. 23, about 1,500 protesters gathered in a public square near Tahrir and chanted against the government’s recent media moves. One protester held up a sign in Arabic that said: “Insulting the President Is One of the Rights We Gained in the Revolution.”
• the situation at state television has measurably improved since Morsy took office. “I don’t see that there’s directives coming from above anymore,” she said. “You can’t say there’s no freedom of expression. We’ve come such a long way.”
• only a small handful of her colleagues were willing to join her in an office protest against the appointment
• she has been professionally marginalized inside the newspaper — given a steady paycheck and nothing to do. She used her free time to write a book called Diary of an al-Ahram Journalist, but fears that title might not be accurate for much longer. “It’s the first time I’ve said to myself, ‘Maybe it’s time to leave,’” she said.

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• The current regime meanwhile is combining the very best of pre-2011 media repression techniques with a classic February 2011 xenophobia campaign with the force of an Interior Ministry stretching its sinewy muscles as it resurrects itself.  

    
• After the detained "foreign" men were shown on television on Friday night the next day in Ramses Square foreign journalists were physically attacked and detained. Two had to be bundled into an army APC for their own safety. Another was marched to Azbakeya police station and told firmly to leave Egypt. He was subsequently the victim of a citizens' arrest on the same day. Another female journalist who works for a foreign outlet said that while in Ramses Square, a cop ordered men around her to beat her up, telling them that she is American. The presidency on Saturday gave a presser in which Mostafa Hegazy, an advisor, repeatedly talked about Egyptians' "bitterness" at international coverage of events. On Sunday, the Der Spiegel correspondent was detained for seven hours while at Rabea al-Adaweya and claimed that the main accusation against him was "bad reports in the Western press."
• It looks like we are heading towards media oppression that will be worse than under 2011. There is a public appetite for it and the security bodies have apparently been given a green light to do as they please. Wars on terrorism rely on crude binaries: you are either with us or against us, and this is the constant message being relayed to us (Hegazy even said during the presser yesterday that Egypt is "taking note of who is with it and who is against it"). Attempting to steer through the choppy mess that is Egypt at the moment with such a simplistic approach is disastrous and is intended to reinforce the fiction that there are only two camps in Egypt. This is about bolstering the military regime's strength, and its strength is dependent on the creation of an equal and opposing force against which it must pit itself. The Brotherhood has become its raison d'etre: There is no other reason to justify its current position and current actions. 
• If the terrorist case is so cut and dried, and is as clear as the sun, why does the regime need to constantly repeat it? Why does the presidency deliver statements in English first? Why has private satellite channel ONtv Live dubbed its transmission into English? Why is the international media being given “advice” by the State Information Service about its coverage urging outlets to be “accurate in their coverage and not to rely on false information and use only verified reports in a bid to convey an honest image without any distortion”? I fear dark days ahead for media outlets that don’t see the same “honest image” as the Egyptian state.

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• “The conditions that they are being held in now is much better than before. Definitely a result of foreign media pressure,” tweeted the family members of Greste’s detained colleague, Mohamed Fahmy, from his Twitter account on Feb. 5.
• A campaign first begun in Kenya to support Greste and other detained journalists in Egypt is growing daily, expounding the message that “journalism is not terrorism.” Supporters across the world are sharing photos with their mouths taped shut, holding handwritten signs with the hashtag #FreeAJStaff.
• Fahmy’s family members also tweeted from his account on Feb. 5 that the three journalists are being held in the same cell. The news comes as a great relief to supporters who have been worriedly reporting on their ill treatment in prison — including the detention of Fahmy and Mohamed in insect-infested solitary confinement cells in a maximum security wing of Tora prison, 24 hours a day, for more than a month without beds or sunlight, sometimes without blankets.
• a 22-minute arrest video seemingly released to support the case against Fahmy and Greste immediately backfired, with many on social media ridiculing its dramatic soundtrack and ill-informed interrogators.
• journalists here continue to work under the threat of a continuing government crackdown that remains unclear in scope and legality, sometimes aided by the public
• “The ongoing regression against journalists occupies my mind these days. It's unfortunate for aspiring young reporters to work in such atmosphere that forces you to choose: either with us or you are against us.”
• In addition to the threat of attack, injury, death or arrest while reporting amid clashes or in tense crowds, a few journalists here are even expressing worry at the sound of their doorbell ringing, after several foreign and Egyptian journalists were arrested from their homes in recent weeks

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