Freedom House is an organization that is dedicated to promoting free institutions worldwide. In order to do this the organization gives reports and statuses on the freedoms of every country. In 2013 Freedom House downgraded Egypt’s freedom of press from ‘Partly Free’ to ‘Not Free’. This downgrade in status speaks volumes on the contentious and ever-changing situation with the Egyptian government. The reasons behind the downgrade were that Egypt has had campaigns to intimidate journalists, that there have been increased efforts to persecute journalists who talk badly about political leadership and there is a reduced availability of balanced coverage in the country.
The reduction of balanced news coverage in Egypt is related to when former president Mohamed Morsi took over power in 2012. Morsi was a leader for the Muslim Brotherhood and appointed a fellow Muslim Brotherhood member to be in charge of producing a pro-government bias to the national media. The Brotherhood’s newspaper, Freedom and Justice, became a platform to the overt promotion of Morsi’s policies. Now that Morsi has been thrown out of power the interim government has seemed to go too far on the opposite end of the spectrum. As mentioned in another blog post the interim president, Aldy Mansour, prohibited the printing of the Freedom and Justice newspaper and any publication that was in favor of Morsi. By taking these actions the new government is doing exactly what Morsi did, which is restrict news coverage to only things that are favorable to them and that virtually eliminates balanced news coverage. I find it a little ironic that Morsi was thrown out of power for promoting a biased media, but the new government is doing the same exact thing by not allowing news that isn’t favorable to the current leadership situation. By limiting news from multiple and sometimes conflicting news outlets it hurts citizens’ abilities to see multiple perspectives on issues. By not allowing this to happen the Egyptian government is influencing how they want their citizens to think, whether they realize it or not. This absence of balanced coverage in Egypt is a huge hit for their freedom of press and because of that I feel they were rightfully downgraded to ‘Not Free’.
Posted by Tyler Ainge
Source: http://www.freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-press/2013/egypt