by Ahmed Magdy Youssef*
Egypt's last two weeks’ incessant events not only gripped the minds and hearts of the Egyptians, but they captured the interest of the national and international media as well.
For many Egyptians, mostly those who filled public squares across the country to demand Mr. Morsi's removal and early presidential elections, the military's intervention on July 3 was inevitable to save the most heavily populated Arab country from slipping into a civil war.
By contrast, Egyptian Islamists and other supporters of Mr. Morsi remain steadfast in their rejection of what they call a "military coup", refusing to acknowledge the military-backed interim president Adli Mansour and his newly-appointed vice president and prime minister as legitimate. Mr. Morsi's supporters have staged a series of mass rallies in Cairo, demanding the reinstating of the ousted president.
Between the two camps, Egypt's media outlets have chosen to take sides in the ongoing tragic split. To put it more pointedly, not only the state-owned media avowedly backed the military after Morsi's ouster, but most of the Egyptian privately-owned TV stations and newspapers as well have embraced the military's perspective.
It's no secret to say that Egypt's media landscape has never been non-partisan. The Muslim Brotherhood's TV station - Misr 25 - and others run by their Islamist allies, in addition to newspapers like Freedom and Justice, official newspaper of the MB's Freedom and Justice Party (FJP), were undoubtedly partisan. Additionally, being perpetually accused of aligning with the regime that rules, state-owned newspapers like Al-Ahram did partly side with Mr. Morsi before the 30-June demonstrations. On the flip side, most of Egypt's privately-owned networks and newspapers were whole-heartedly in the anti-Morsi camp. Their dehumanization and demonization of the Brotherhood's members and other Islamists, not to mention their disparaging of the pro-Morsi protests, has become engrained.
It all reached a crescendo on July 3 after the "popular" ouster of Morsi by the army's generals. Under the expediency of restoring national order, the military-led authorities shut down Islamist-run TV stations, including Misr 25, and arrested their managers. Only the Freedom and Justice newspaper "survived" the media crackdown!
With only one tone dominating Egypt's mainstream media, most of the national media outlets went berserk over what was called the "Republican Guard Massacre". Last week, more than 50 pro-Morsi protesters were shot to death by the armed forces in clashes between the two sides in front of the Presidential Guards.
The aforementioned outlets not only have failed to acknowledge wrongdoing on the part of the military, but have directed their ire toward the victims, Mr. Morsi's supporters, as well. By adopting the military's viewpoint that revolves around accusing the pro-Morsi protesters of trying to raid the military's facility, many Egyptian media outlets vindicated or even praised the "valiant" actions of the army!
This was further aggravated by some western media, such as The Telegraph, who published footage of an Egyptian photographer who chronicled his own death. The 26-year-old photographer from the Freedom and Justice newspaper was among the victims killed by the armed forces in the Republican Guard massacre's incident. He had managed to capture the moment in which an army soldier with a rifle on top of a yellow stone building shot him dead! However, this footage was circulated only through different social network sites like Facebook. None of Egypt's state or privately-owned television channels broadcast this footage!
In this polarized environment, many supporters of Mr. Morsi have resorted to Al-Jazeera's Arabic-language channel, alongside western networks such as CNN , to cater to their needs of seeing unabated coverage of the pro-Morsi protests, in addition to the dismissal of the opposition rallies.
Previously, Egypt's state-owned and independent media outlets were drifting into two distinct camps; pro- and anti- Morsi. But, from the moment Mr. Morsi was ousted from the political scene, these two different viewpoints have been steered into one sole anti-Morsi direction. This trend, most probably, will continue for a while, till the Islamist TV stations reopen again, given their popularity, wide audience base and their traditional role as primary source of information for the Islamist camp.
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*Ahmed Magdy Youssef holds an MA in Global Journalism from Örebro University in Sweden. He has researched the media coverage of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, and is currently monitoring the Egyptian media system through the national media watch group, Egypt's Media Credibility Index (MCE Watch).
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