A dual attack is being led by the Muslim Brotherhood’s Minister of Information, Salah Abdel-Maqsoud, against state-owned and private media, through his attempts to terrify staff of the Egyptian TV Building in Maspero. His ministry is poking into the files of several private channels, the final of which has been Dream Channel, where presenter Taghrid Dosoqi was interrogated for unintended comments made on the air.

A dual attack is being led by the Muslim Brotherhood’s Minister of Information, Salah Abdel-Maqsoud, against state-owned and private media, through his attempts to terrify staff of the Egyptian TV Building in Maspero. His ministry is poking into the files of several private channels, the final of which has been Dream Channel, where presenter Taghrid Dosoqi was interrogated for unintended comments made on the air.

Dosoqi suggests that Abdel-Maqsoud’s scrutiny indicates the dictatorship to which Egypt is currently being subjected and the stress that the interrogations of Maspero presenters and program creators reflect the deteriorating state-owned media.

Dosoqi explains that she could not discuss the issue freely since other staff members are engaged, especially those working in ‘Naharak Sa’eed’ program which has been suspended for unreasonable explanations. “I cannot comment on this issue since other people work in this program. I am afraid they would be hurt by those currently managing Maspero!” she said.

The Mubarak era, Dosoqi suggests, did not witness such a large number of interrogation cases of media figures, which shows that the dictatorship of the Muslim Brotherhood is more aggressive than that of Mubarak’s.

She finds it strange that these interrogations are supervised by the information minster, while  the financial and administration corruption in the television body have gone unscrutinized.

Settling Scores

“The Minister of Information is trapping his opponents in Egyptian television,” says Entisar Gharib, Coordinator of Media Revolutionist Front, stressing that Abdel-Maqsoud is settling scores with the President oppositionists within the Television and Radio Building, which is evident in what media figure Buthaina Kamel has been exposed to. It is a mere technical error that occurs repeatedly and in different programs; Kamel did not know the microphones were not turned off.

Gharib suggests that these arbitrary measures taken against media figures in Maspero Building, starting with reading scripts of different programs, to monitoring their subjects, and ending with interrogating several personnel for illogical reasons, indicate that the current media is being subjected to the same old measures as a regime-oriented media; becoming trapped  for the slightest opposing tone.

Gharib believes that state media will not be able to represent the Egyptian people without a large purification campaign targeting all media leadership, starting with the minister and ending with the administratively and financially corrupted figures. She also stresses the need to reconstruct media to represent people’s dreams and ambitions instead of the state’s, and present the truth, rather than call for the truce the minister himself has repeatedly called for.

Some things never change

Presenter Mahmoud Sharaf narrates another part of the Maspero crisis. He said that the state  declared its intention to establish a new complex for the Egyptian TV and radio in October at an estimated cost of about US $391 million while Maspero employees have not received their salaries for more than four months. Moreover, TV channels are exchanging studios and equipment due to the absence of studios qualified for filming.

Sharaf suggests that since the revolution nothing has changed in Egyptian television, and things are getting even worse, whether at the level of material or civil rights. This is clearly evident in the high-level orders received by some colleagues in the Nile Culture Channel, preventing the approach of Sinai and Nubia by the official media.

Sharaf believes that not all faults committed within Maspero are to be attributed to the low level of freedom; rather, they sometimes result from the absence of training and certain skills on the part of the media. He admits that the freedom crisis is accompanied by the absence of professionalism and objectivity in many cases, whether in support or criticism of the regime.

Sharaf calls for giving the staff their rights, providing sufficient training and job opportunities, working objectively and rejecting political and intellectual biases.

As for private channels, Wa’el Abrashi, a presenter from Dream Channel, says the practices of the minister and the state toward private media, reflect the ministry’s fear and will to muzzle mouths and stifle opposing voices, which is evidenced by the minister’s call for a truce with the media so that Freedom and Justice Party can exploit time and opportunities to implement its policies in Egypt.

Abrashi also suggests that the abrupt decision of closing Dream Channel reflects the extent of arbitrary decisions, which all private and state-owned satellite channels may undergo, especially since the state is on its way towards deterioration rather than progress.

Abrashi explains that progress can be achieved only when the media is purified and its figures obtain freedom, and that fabrication on the part of the state, in order to suspend private cannels and muzzle and subjugate state-owned media, will only lead to more violence and instability.

Safwat Alem, a professor at the Faculty of Mass Communication at Cairo University, says there are legal reasons for  suspending Dream Channel as well as other channels; however, it is astonishing that dozens of other satellite channels violate broadcasting law. These channels include Aljazeera, the Muslim Brotherhood’s ’25 Channel’, Tahrir, and other channels that cannot film in cramped studios unfit for filming.

Even though the Dream Channel has issues of legality, Alem suggests, the decision is not completely void of examining the closed files of the channels opposing Muslim Brotherhood policies. He calls on the Muslim Brotherhood to pay attention to the national interest before settling their scores with the opponent channels.

For his part, the production manager of Dream network insists that what the minster keeps repeating about the channel’s debt as the reason for its closing, is untrue and that the decision can only be understood as an issue of score settling.