Media in Egypt and Tunisia: From Control to Transition?

From Control to Transition?

E. Webb

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137409966
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Giornalismo

This book examines the mass media systems of Egypt and Tunisia under the pre-uprising regimes, with a focus on the last decade of the Mubarak and Ben Ali periods, as well as on how media are adapting to the political transitions underway. Findings are based on extensive interviews with journalists.

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Egyptian and Tunisian Media Systems in Global Context

Abstract: This chapter sets the research in context of both political science literature of transitions and adaptable authoritarianism in the Arab world and communications studies of comparative media systems. It argues that even in an era of media globalization, national media systems remain distinct and are worth studying. It discusses various schemas for categorizing media systems, and explains and justifies the interview-based research methods used in the book. Finally, it maps out the rest of the book.

Keywords: Arab states; authoritarianism; censorship; Egypt; media; Middle East; North Africa; transitions; Tunisia

Webb, Edward. Media in Egypt and Tunisia: From Control to Transition? New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. DOI: 10.1057/9781137409966.0004.

After tens of supporters of deposed president Mohamed Morsi were killed in unclear circumstances at dawn on July 8, 2013, Egyptian security authorities held a press conference. Not only did reporters not ask any challenging questions about the civilian deaths, they also applauded the spokesperson. Moreover, they supported the expulsion from the press conference of a crew from Al Jazeera, criticized by the authorities for airing footage from the field hospital where many dead and wounded from the incident were taken. Yet this was two years after an uprising to overthrow a police state, in an Egypt that was by many indications freer and more open than it had been for many decades. How are we to understand the behavior of these media professionals? What are the implications of a press corps that behaves in this way?

Six months later, the implications seemed very dark indeed. Morsi’s party’s newspaper had been banned shortly after the coup, along with four Islamist television channels. Hundreds more supporters of the deposed president had been killed or detained. The vast majority of Egyptian media, whether state-owned or in the private sector, was pumping out a barrage of pro-military propaganda and jingoism. Journalists, particularly foreign journalists or those working for (or suspected to be working for) unpopular organizations like Al Jazeera, found themselves under serious threat simply for doing their jobs: some were imprisoned, some indicted on terrorism-related charges, others attacked in the streets by crowds whipped into a paranoid frenzy by the state-owned media’s propaganda. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) and other NGOs, local and international, Egypt’s Journalists’ Syndicate, and many individual journalists themselves protested the increasingly bleak and dangerous climate faced by the profession (Abdel Kouddous 2014; El-Dabh 2014). Some argued that things were as bad as under Mubarak, or worse.

There are some reasons to be cautiously hopeful about the future of Egypt’s media, even if the challenges are far greater than those faced in Tunisia, where a generally peaceful transition toward a pluralist democracy provides a sharp contrast to Egypt’s troubled post-uprising politics. Generational shifts and technological change, as well as the broader context of a broken barrier of fear in relations between individuals and state institutions, mean that there is potential for positive change. But in the way stand not only authoritarian rulers, but also institutional inertia, endemic corruption, and a conservative culture dominating the journalistic profession.

Globalization, national media systems, and adaptive authoritarianism

A major concern of scholars of the politics of the Arab states, particularly since the “Third Wave” of democratization, has been to explain the apparent robustness of authoritarian regimes in the region (Bellin 2004). The Arab uprisings demand an assessment of the extent to which the apparent robustness of the region’s authoritarianisms may have been illusory (Bellin 2012). One prominent argument has been that autocrats have learned and adapted in order to hold on to power (Heydemann 2007; Stacher 2012). In what follows, I examine the adaptive media strategies of two regimes that ultimately yielded to regime-challenging popular protest, in order to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the two authoritarian media systems and what their legacy might be, including what they might mean for democratization.

Media systems have a core function in adaptive authoritarianism. Holding down a population by force alone is expensive and unsustainable: “Authoritarian governments need some support and a good deal of acquiescence to remain in power” (Geddes 1999, 138), and media help generate acquiescence. Darnton argues that “authoritarian systems may contain a self-defeating element in their attempts to monopolize power: by controlling the means of communication, they provoke counterreactions and foster a critical turn of mind; they inadvertently teach skepticism and thereby undermine their own legitimacy” (1995, 58).¹ But it is not necessarily legitimacy that is the counterpart of coercion in authoritarian settings—cynicism may work well enough, making populations acquiescent rather than actively consenting, acting “as if” they support the existing order (Wedeen 1999). Media can perform a demobilizing and fig-leaf function, particularly if carefully limited pluralism is present, in a similar way to rigged elections. As Bradford Dillman put it in his study of elections across North Africa, “the elections can be seen as mechanisms for a top-down ‘artificializing’ of pluralism in order to preserve the core of regime control” (Dillman 2000, 211); so, too, can media preserve control by providing enough artificial pluralism to deflect or undermine criticism or to demobilize through cynicism:

In authoritarian regimes, state-controlled media seek to isolate activists from society at large, with the idea of preventing them from organizing and mobilizing. To this end, state-run media try to discredit in the public’s mind any notion of a political alternative. State media attacks delegitimize civil society and the opposition, paving the way for other repressive measures, while accusing oppositionists of wanting to cause chaos, a charge that may resonate widely in societies with histories of political instability. (Orttung & Walker 2014)

Any medium of communication can be subject to efforts at control, but which media, and what content, varies widely. Totalitarian states seek to control all information, as their ambition is to shape all aspects of society. Other states set priorities in their censorship regimes based upon social, political, and other interests. Some media attract greater attention from the authorities than others, regardless of content. “Governments . . . typically employ censorship to protect their power base. That is probably why books are often not as strictly controlled as the mass media. As material directed at an educated elite, a small minority in most developing countries, books are considered less dangerous to the power base of the ruling elite than daily newspapers, let alone radio or television” (Peleg 1993, 132). What counts as a dangerous mass medium changes as technology and tastes change. For instance, in Britain, theater was regulated for centuries as a mass medium. But by “the late 1960s, theatre was no longer a medium of mass entertainment” and government gave up censorship powers (Sutter 2000). In the Arab world, by contrast, theater has remained a heavily controlled medium: “there is hardly a dramatist in the Arab world who at one time or another has not encountered difficulties in seeing his or her creations performed in front of an audience” (Anonymous 1993).

The most direct form of control is ownership, by the state or those close to it, and this has been a favored tool of governments in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) for some time. Naomi Sakr’s studies of television in Lebanon and elsewhere have, quite rightly, stressed ownership as a key factor in understanding the evolution of media in the region. But it is not prudent to import assumptions from western experiences, which, in any case, do not all point in one direction. As Hafez puts it, “private ownership does not necessarily lead to liberalization in the same way as state ownership is not equivalent to censorship and information control” (2001, 9). Where private owners are bound to the state in neopatrimonial networks, as they have been in the region for some time, the distinction between state-run and privately held entities is not inevitably a clear and predictable one: “In the Gulf states, although the papers are privately owned, the results are the same as if they were run by the state. Regimes maintain control in part by hand-picking editors and heads of sections; changes in management are not permitted without the knowledge of the ministry of information” (Koeppel 1988). Baydar, writing particularly of experience in Turkey, argues that in “democratic transitions, pluralism and diversity do not mean much if they consist only of a competition between pro-government media and ultrapartisan opposition outlets. Private ownership in the media sector must be structured to allow the existence of a credible, independent, vibrant and high-quality Fourth Estate” but notes that the absence of credible, truly independent media is not a problem specific to the Mediterranean region:

Across the globe, and especially in young or struggling democracies like Argentina, Venezuela, Brazil, the Philippines, South Africa, Hungary and Albania, the lack of media independence is doing real damage. Media executives who intimidate or censor reporters while kowtowing to governments to protect their other business interests are undermining the freedom and independence of the press that is vital to establishing and consolidating a democratic political culture. (Baydar 2013)

The following case studies show both commonalities and divergence in attempts to sustain acquiescence. Egypt and Tunisia have intrinsic importance, being the first that triggered other uprisings in the region. They also have theoretical interest in the study of media systems in adaptive authoritarianism, in that the two regimes took different paths in recent history: both saw a limited, controlled diversification of media ownership over the last decade before the uprisings; but Egypt permitted a meaningful increase in the margin of freedom of journalistic expression, whereas Tunisia maintained tight control over all media. Their paths since the uprisings have also differed.

In the spirit of Hallin and Mancini’s comparative analytical approach, I seek here “to address theoretical questions about the relation between media systems and their social and political contexts, to understand change over time in media systems, and to deepen our understandings of particular national media institutions” (2004, 302). This book studies how the pre-uprising regimes in Egypt and Tunisia managed or resisted change in media, and what the consequences of their strategies may be for the transitional and future political regimes.

Over the past two decades, authoritarian states in the region have had to contend with international challenges, such as the spread of democracy and economic liberalization, as well as changes in the regional status quo, such as the Iraq wars. Local economic and demographic trends have also posed challenges (UNDP 2009; Soliman 2011). Developments in information and communications technologies such as satellite television and the Internet have affected the ideological space of regional societies (Howard 2011; Lynch 2006; Seib 2007). To the extent that regimes have adapted in response to such challenges, it is in order to preserve the existing order. If institutions have survived, it is because they seem useful to that purpose.

For all that there has been an increasing availability of both empirical reporting and analysis on different aspects of Arab media, it is still a relatively underexplored field compared to studies of western media. Arab media systems are often dealt with together, or broken down sub-regionally (Rugh 1979, 2004; Sakr 2007). Tunisia and Egypt are part of the Arab systems but are also part of a Mediterranean world, geographically, historically (including the history of colonialism), and culturally. They have some relationships to European media systems through these histories. In the era of globalization, they are also subject to influences from dominant global media—the liberal, “Anglo-Saxon” model in particular—as well as from regional actors well financed by Gulf money.

Across the Arab world, technological and political developments have driven changes in national media systems. In 2001, Kai Hafez was able to report that “mass media in the Arab world and the Middle East have undergone profound changes since the beginning of the 1990s. The introduction and spread of new technologies such as satellite television and the Internet have extended media spaces beyond the local, national, and regional realm” (Hafez 2001, 1). At the same time, Hussein Amin argued that whereas “nations around the word privatize, restructure, and align to compete internationally, the Arab world remains impeded by the old political divisions, static economic models, and poor media structures and performance” (Amin 2001, 24). MENA states have attempted to dominate and tame these changing spaces through both coercive and market power. For instance, Emma Murphy records that “Saudi Arabia (as the richest regional market) sets the agenda by virtue of its advertising power” (Murphy 2011, 115). But even this agenda-setting power may be under challenge through political changes and diversification of outlets. The intense rivalry between Saudi Arabia’s Al Arabiya media empire and Qatar’s Al Jazeera takes place in what has become a crowded market across all platforms. This may have political consequences at the national as well as regional level: “homogenized social, religious and cultural messages associated with state-controlled media in contexts of nation-building have given way to a vast diversity of messages that are often profoundly at odds with those that preceded them and that have eroded the cultural boundaries that previously mapped onto their sovereign counterparts” (Murphy 2011, 113). Many recent studies accordingly have focused on transnational aspects of media development and emerging pan-Arab public spheres (for example, Lynch 2006; Zweiri & Murphy 2011).

This book, however, insists on the continuing relevance of national media systems. Although the cross-fertilization between Arab media ecosystems is of some interest here, I do not privilege it over other transnational influences, and I consider neither decisive when compared to the importance of states in regulating and influencing information distribution and consumption within their territories. Here, I follow Hafez (2007) and others who interrogate the idea that media globalization is overwhelming the ability of states to exercise a significant degree of control over the media operating and available on their territories. Global influences are apparent. Indeed, almost all interviewed in Egypt gave some credit to pressures from without, political and technological, for the opening of the media system there over the past decade or so, whereas these were present but less apparent in the case of Tunisia (Haugbølle & Cavatorta 2012).² Yet it is the differences between the two cases in the last years of the Mubarak and Ben Ali periods that throw into relief the continuing relevance of the nation-state as a dominant actor in shaping local media landscapes.

Despite the diffusion of many norms within media professions—such as the “dramatisation aesthetic” dominating television news (Hahn 2007, 24)—national media systems and cultures persist. This book shares with the collection edited by Curran and Park the supposition, supported by their contributors’ case studies, that “nations are still centrally important” not only because “national states are influential in shaping media systems” but also because “the nation is still a very important marker of difference” so that “media systems are shaped not merely by national regulatory regimes and national audience preferences, but by a complex ensemble of social relations that have taken shape in national contexts” (Curran & Park 2000b, 11–12). MENA states have not been able to ignore developments internationally in media technologies, trends, and so on. But in order to reduce the risk of demonstration effects³ undermining their control over their societies, they have adapted to allow what they presume to be less harmful media content, such as entertainment and sport, to enter their markets, while seeking to filter out more subversive content, or to drown it out by saturating national media spaces with other material, a response to globalization Hafez terms “counter-regulation” (2007, 156). In this, they are aided by important differences in the character of news content from other kinds:

Entertainment may have a global hue in many respects. News and information, however, can be domesticated almost at will, because they are created for a very limited, usually national group of consumers typified by national interests, reservations, stereotypes and cultural expectations. The media hav...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Egyptian and Tunisian Media Systems in Global Context
• 2  Egypt
• 3  Tunisia
• 4  After the Uprisings
• 5  A Few Recommendations
• Bibliography
• Index