A year on from the uprising which ousted Hosni Mubarak, Egyptians are still waiting for media reforms. Shahira Amin reports

One year after the mass uprising that forced former President Hosni Mubarak to relinquish power, Egyptians are still waiting for comprehensive media reforms that would pave the way for democracy. The military authorities controlling the country in the transitional period have yet to loosen their tight grip on the media and purge Egyptian state media of corrupt employees.

The media scene is more vibrant and diverse than it was under Mubarak’s authoritarian regime, but even after the launch of new private TV channels and publications, and the debut appearances of opposition figures on the small screen, some media analysts claim the reforms are not deep enough to effect tangible change.

“Red lines remain that cannot be crossed. In the old days Mubarak was the red line. Today, it is the ruling military council or SCAF,” says journalist Khaled Dawoud who works for state-sponsored Al Ahram.

From the outset, the interim military government issued directives for any media coverage of the military to be sent to the for review before broadcast or publication. Broadcasters and editors working for Egyptian state-owned and independent media continue to complain about heavy censorship of their work, and in recent months several have resigned in protest. Prominent talk show host Hafez Al Mirazi recently became the latest broadcaster to quit his job, after the owner of the independent Dream TV kept Al Mirazi from showing a video of Magdi el Gallad, editor in chief of El Masry el Youm, expressing support for Gamal Mubarak’s candidacy for president. Al Mirazi vowed not to return until the station, owned by prominent businessman Ahmed Bahgat, aired the episode in full. Bahgat, who had close ties to the Mubarak regime, later argued that showing the video would only inflame public sentiment and turn public opinion against Gallad.

Youssri Foda, another veteran journalist was off the air for several weeks in November after ONTV — owned by wealthy businessman Naguib Sawiris — censored his show after hosting author Alaa el Aswany, outspoken critic of the military regime. In August, presenter Dina Abdel Rahman made headlineswhen her Daily Morning Show on Dream TV was abruptly ended after challenging a retired air force major general who had boasted that “the Egyptian army was teaching the public KG1 Democracy”. Her bosses reprimanded her and replaced her with another presenter the next day. Abdel Rahman has since returned to the small screen, hosting an evening talk show on another private satellite channel where she has been pushing the boundaries of political discourse.

Meanwhile, state TV is struggling to regain credibility lost after biased coverage of last January’s uprising. During the eighteen days of mass protests, state TV waged an information war against pro-democracy activists, launching a smear campaign aimed at delegitimising the goals of the revolution. The airwaves were saturated with fabricated tales of treacherous protesters, including a televised confession from a young woman claiming that the CIA trained her to instigate the mass protests. State media changed its tone as soon as Mubarak fell, with editors back pedalling to take the side of revolutionaries. A front page banner in state-owned Al Ahram on 12 February (the day after the ousting of Mubarak) read: “The authoritarian regime has fallen!”

But soon the editors slid back to their old habits, repeating the mistakes of the past. During violent clashes at Maspero in October, Rasha Magdy, a state TV newscaster urged the public to defend the military against attacks by Coptic protesters. Magdy’s plea earned her the wrath of the public and she was accused of inciting violence against the protesters.

Calls for a public service broadcaster to replace the propaganda machine of the ruling authorities have so far been ignored and a former military general has been appointed as Minister of Information in the new cabinet — despite calls to dismantle the ministry altogether and replace it with a media council. Journalists opposing the appointment of the minister say the move can only mean tighter control of the media and more propaganda for the military authorities. “We had hoped that television in the post — revolutionary era would become the mouthpiece of the people not the regime,” lamented Salma Amer, a former reporter at state TV.

But the picture isn’t totally bleak. The courage shown by some journalists fighting for journalistic ethics, the proliferation of new voices in the media and breaking the barrier of fear are all encouraging signs that change is on the way. The media landscape is being transformed and the introduction of political satire in comedy shows like Bassem Youssef’s The Program would have been unthinkable just a year ago. Despite being on air for just a few months, Youssef is already a household name in Egypt and has developed a mass following for his unique brand of sarcastic humor. For him, the sky’s the limit and Youssef has mercilessly poked fun at practically everything and everyone including the military establishment.

“One of the fruits from the 25 January Revolution has been the new energy injected in Egyptian media,”  says prominent journalist and correspondent Ayman Mohieldeen.

Mohieldeen’s optimism is shared by a few hopeful media analysts who believe that a new momentum has been started. And, they assure us, the trend is irreversible.

Tuesday’s expected declaration of Tunisia’s election results will say much about the main players in its great adventure in democracy building. But it won’t reveal much about what those players plan to do with with their unique mandate. For that you’ll need an independent Tunisian media, in print, on air and online.

In turn that means a new legal and institutional framework based on freedom of expression, swifter development of the broadcast and print media sectors and protections for the the internet against the resurgence of censorship.

Tunisia’s Sunday elections will establish a 217-member constituent assembly to draft a new constitution and give legitimacy to an interim government ahead of full parliamentary elections.

The extraordinary turnout, estimated at an astounding 90 per cent, gives both authority and diversity to the new assembly. It increases the chances that the assembly will allow space for women, rural and inland industrial communities and a proportional voice for minorities — a priority of the Ben Achour Commission that led the election’s organisation.

It also finally gives some kind of true measure to Islamist political influence and brings members of the old regime still in politics out of the shadows.

The stage is set for a complex debate that will test the Tunisian media and its capacity to communicate the works of the new assembly. But despite solid efforts by the country’s post-revolution National Authority to Reform Information and Communication (INRIC) — the media landscape evolution has been slow.

To meet the challenge the new assembly must promote strong constitutional and legal guarantees for freedom of expression rights and access to information. There will need to be a properly supported successor to INRIC, an independent regulatory body that can effectively promote the independence and growth of the media.

The new body and the regulations that it implements will have to guide public service broadcasting as well as private, commercial and community broadcasting and empower and protect journalists dedicated to quality journalism that can serve and inform the public at large.

Just voted, photo by ze_dach on Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

These points were raised this month by the International Freedom of Expression Exchange Tunisia Monitoring Group (IFEX-TMG), currently chaired by Index on Censorship.

Based on the results of a two-day strategy workshop of Tunisian media and legal experts held in Tunis on 27 and 28 September, its report also calls for the promotion of a digital culture, by supporting blogging, online activism and citizen journalism.

It’s not clear how the assembly will handle new legislation, or how it will deal with current draft decrees that will have force of law but in the case of the print and broadcast sector have proven highly contentious in their drafting.

An increasingly heated debate between Islamists and secularists in Tunisia led to a street protest by thousands of liberal demonstrators the week before the vote. On 9 October, over 300 pro-Islamists tried to attack the HQ of Nessma TV after a showing of the film Persepolis, which takes an acerbic view of Islamists in Iran.

That was followed by the filing of a claim signed by 144 lawyers alleging breaches of the still valid pre-revolution media law by Nessma TV head Nabil Karoui and articles 226 and 226 (b) of the criminal code prohibiting offences against religion and public decency.

Sami Ben Abdallah, a Tunisian blogger resident in France, was banned from leaving Tunis airport in September and questioned for allegedly sending insulting SMS messages. His family told Reporters sans Frontieres they linked the harrassment to his investigations into a businessman close to the former regime.

These and other incidents suggest that the rights of the independent media in Tunisia is built on much less stable foundations than its citizens expect and demand, especially given its responsibilities in the months to come.

Click here for tweets, links and features from the opening hours of the 23 October constitutional assembly elections in Tunisia on Storify.

Rohan Jayasekera is Associate Editor at Index on Censorship, which currently chairs the IFEX Tunisia Monitoring group of free expression advocacy organisations.

Following the latest series of phone-taps legally acquired by the press as evidence in some of the trials involving either the prime minister or his good friends, the new law would require the judiciary to only disclose phone-taps that are considered to be directly relevant to the case.

Even the famous anti-mafia magistrate Ilda Bocassini, who has been involved in some of the trials against the prime minister and was especially targeted Berlusconi’s campaign against “communist judges,” believes that this new measure would be fair.

In a recent interview to the Corriere della Sera, Bocassini stressed that she was outraged by the publication of phone-taps, claiming it was completely irrelevant to the ongoing trials. She was not only referring to the famous private remarks about German Chancellor Angela Merkel, but also to much of the published material.

Of course there are a lot of other phone-tap stories depicting a depressing picture of the excess involved in the life of a powerful and rich man like Berlusconi, which are definitely still in the public interest, as they paint an impressive fresco of widespread nepotism and recommendations, in both the private and the public sector.

But the story is not so simple. Just as Berlusconi’s aim is to protect himself, the same is true of his allies and even a sizeable portion of his opposition. Phone-taps are among the few tools with which the press, and therefore the public, can hold their representatives accountable. A complete lack of transparency has characterised post-war Italy for historical and cultural reasons, not least because we do not possess an equivalent word for “accountability”.

A serious lack of investigative journalism has probably been compensated for by the easy scoops gained from material gathered by the judiciary. This consideration has to be remembered when we observe the firm stance against the law taken by journalists all over the political spectrum.

That being said, this law does more than request the judiciary to double check the information they make available to the public. It allows the executive to shut down web pages, bypassing the judiciary power in case of defamation; it forces newspapers to rectify what they wrote within 48 hours at the request of the person “offended” by the article;  it includes heavy fines for newspapers that publish material leaked from the judiciary, and it will probably include prison sentences for guilty journalists.

All of this despite the fact that we already have strong libel laws.

Moreover, these new restrictive measures are intended to be valid not only for newspapers but for any website or blog. This was the reason for Wikipedia’s “strike”, which ended today.

In a country where everybody is enduring heavy austerity measures due to the never ending mismanagement of public money – it is hard to accept a measure intended to make the political class even less accountable.

The government has announced, then retracted, that it will pass the law with a vote of confidence. If so, the law will pass, because none of Berlusconi’s allies want to let him down, scared of what will happen to them without the direct backing of his mighty media empire.

We can just hope, that the government will, in the end decide not to go ahead due to the extreme aversion of both the journalists and the civil society. If that is the case, a lot of time will have been wasted, time that could have been used to tackle some of the economic and social problems that affect our nation.

The position of the media reporting

A committee investigating the growth of super injunctions and anonymised privacy injunctions has emphasised the need for open justice and public hearings.

Lord Neuberger, Master of the Rolls, formed the committee in April 2010 in response to widespread concern about secret injunctions whose very existence could not be reported.

The committee, which reported its findings at the Royal Courts of Justice on Friday, has made a number of procedural recommendations, such as the creation of a secure database tracking injunctions, and has drafted guidance for injunction applications.

The new procedure, the committee said, would enable the media to be informed about applications in advance.

The committee made a distinction between secret super injunctions, such as those protecting the oil trader Trafigura and the footballer John Terry, and anonymous privacy injunctions for which judgments are publicly available.

While the committee only identified two of the former category since footballer John Terry , the number of anonymised privacy injunctions has increased.

“Injunctions have until early 2010 been granted perhaps a bit too readily,” Lord Neuberger told the assembled media.

Neuberger said the committee was “obviously anxious that hearings take place as much as possible in public”.

Sensitive information could be dealt with by reference to a private document, he said.

Lord Neuberger found the law relating to contempt of court for reporting parliament as “astonishingly unclear”.

Questions were raised following the use of parliamentary privilege to challenge recent privacy injunctions.

On Thursday, the High Court varied the details of a privacy injunction involving the former Royal Bank of Scotland chief executive, Sir Fred Goodwin, after Lord Stoneham used parliamentary privilege to reveal more details about the injunction to House of Lords peers.

In regards to journalists circumventing injunctions by reporting a breach of an injunction in parliament, Lord Neuberger said:

“…I would not to like to pontificate about what the law is a) it does appear to be unclear and b) in due course as a judge I might be asked to rule on what it is and therefore I can’t express a view to you. ”

“It is very unsatisfactory,” he continued. “People should know where they are.”

“Historically the courts and parliament have mutually respected each others’ territory and have worked very well together.

“I have every expectation and certainly every faith that this will continue in relation to this particular topic.”

The Lord Chief Justice, Lord Judge, suggested that the internet might be further regulated for injunction breaches in future:

“I’m not giving up on the possibility that people who, in effect, peddle lies about others through using modern technology may one day be brought under control, maybe through damages, very substantial damages, maybe even through injunctions to prevent the peddling of lies.”

Since the committee hearing took place, Bloomberg Businessweek has reported that lawyers acting for a claimant known as “CTB” have filed papers against Twitter in the High Court in London.

While the document gave no details of the claim, according to Bloomberg, CTB is the set of intials used in CTB v News Group Newspapers Ltd & Anor, involving a footballer and the reality television star Imogen Thomas.

Judith Townend is a freelance journalist and PhD candidate based at City University London. Her blog meejalaw covers digital media law

The legislative process that brought us Hungary’s controversial media law intentionally evaded the legal requirement of public consultation, both before and after the submission of the bill. Pál Schmitt, then Speaker of the Parliament, cooperated with the ruling party by postponing the signing of the bill until the last day possible, when László Sólyom, then President of the Republic, had already left his office, for fear that Sólyom would submit the law to the Constitutional Court.

The law puts all media — including printed press, news sites (and perhaps blogs), television and radio — under a government-run almighty authority. It claims extraterritorial effect, so no medium on Earth (or beyond) is safe from its reach. It has wide investigative powers, severe sanctioning rights and a broad remit, with a Media Commissioner who may investigate even deeds that are not against the law and report them to the Authority.

Content requirements are included in the so-called Media Constitution (2010. CIV.). These include vague categories like the obligation to objective and balanced information, respect human dignity and human rights. If any media outlet — and even blogs may count here — provides content that may potentially hurt any community, or church, or violates any of the other rules of the law, the Authority may impose a fine of up to EUR 722,000 (HUF 200,000,000) for electronic media and up to EUR 90,000 (HUF 25,000,000) for print and online media. After repeated and severe violation of the law, it may also erase an audiovisual media provider from the register.

In order to verify the violations, the authority may access any data, even secrets protected by law, and use this information in any other procedure anytime later. If the information demanded is not provided within the required time in the required format, it may levy a fine up to EUR 180,000 (HUF 50,000,000) to any media outlet, whether print, online, etc. If anyone involved in the procedure — even if only loosely connected to the media outlet against whom the procedure is initiated — shows any behaviour that could potentially hinder the process, he or she may be fined up to EUR 3,600 (HUF 1000,000), or, if it is an organisation, up to EUR 90,000 (HUF 25,000,000).

All decision-making powers, property and income of the public media services (including the state news agency) have been aggregated in the Public Service Fund, which is overseen and managed by the president of the authority. The old public service organisations from now on must operate with just 49 employees each, whereas their staff is subordinated to the fund. Therefore the supervisory structure has become superfluous — the fund itself, however, is under the sole control of the president of the authority.

The president is appointed by the prime minister for a nine-year term and may be reappointed any number of times.

Although governmental influence on media bodies is known in some European countries, in older democracies the political culture guarantees that governments do not misuse such power. In Hungary the rules of the democratic game have not become routine yet –– and they will never,  should this law be implemented. While in the past two decades we witnessed covert attempts to influence theoretically neutral public institutions by political interests, , this government is misusing its political power shamelessly in a direct and open manner.

The law is unquestionably a serious attack on press freedom, and contrary to Article 2 of Lisbon Treaty, Article 10 of the European Convention of Human Rights and Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

Judit Bayer (PhD) is associate professor of media law at King Sigismund College, Budapest. Her research area is new media content regulation and freedom of expression. She published two books on internet regulation and one on public service television

blog.juditbayer.com
www.juditbayer.com

Bigg Boss had already been in the news for content that was increasingly unpalatable at primetime — swearing, occasionally risqué scenes and fights — in what is still a largely conservative country. Rakhi ka Insaaf, a show in which former dancer (and one time Bigg Boss contestant) Rakhi Sawant helps people with their personal quarrels, made headlines when one of her guests supposedly committed suicide after she called him impotent on national television. The channel maintains he was suffering from tuberculosis. In view of growing public anger, the Ministry ordered the shows to move to late night slots and also prohibited news channels from showing clips from these programmes during the day.

Predictably, media types were outraged. Showing a worrying lack of both logic and awareness of normal bedtimes, a talk show host commented “there’s nothing that kids watch at 9pm that they can’t watch at 11pm”. Conflating social and private media consumption, the head of a major entertainment firm asked, “with [the] internet making every possible channel accessible to everyone how can we stop people from watching what they want to?” And proving once and for all that people who appear on Big Brother are not playing with a full deck, a former participant argued that adult content is okay because “we regularly see bloodshed, violence and sex on news channels.”

Outrage is quite the standard response to most things the I&B Ministry does, and often rightly so. Just a few months ago, the Ministry imposed a ten-day ban on Fashion TV for showing (shock, horror) “women with nude upper body” while broadcasting an Alexander McQueen show. The same channel had been banned for two months in 2007 for broadcasting images of what the Times of India delicately called “skimpily-clad women” . The Ministry has previously banned a news channel, an action entertainment channel and even underwear adverts, presumably for using underwear as a means to sell underwear. The idea of banning smoking in Bollywood movies has been publicly discussed for many years now.

However, by insisting that these two shows air only after 11pm, the Ministry is doing what most advanced media systems have done for years. A watershed is a sensible way to protect children from content that is best suited for adults without infringing on the right of the public to watch whatever they want to, whether it is a disturbing documentary or trashy reality TV. In the last two decades, Indian television has gone from two channels to hundreds, but a 2006 bill that would have introduced a regulator and watershed was indefinitely postponed because it went too far in its powers. In the absence of a regulatory body and considering the extremely vocal nature of the new middle class, the I&B Ministry may finally be beginning to grow up. By creating the 11pm-5am timeslot, the Ministry has shown unusual restraint and created a de facto watershed for adult content rather than going the usual nanny state route of banning what New Delhi boffins think is unsuitable to air.

But there is a worrying side to this optimistic argument. On the same day that the I&B Ministry directed to Rakhi ka Insaaf and Bigg Boss to change slots, it issued a second, less reported-upon order. Another channel, SS Music, has been banned for seven days for “obscene and vulgar” content. A small, Telugu-language, regional channel, SS Music enjoys neither the national influence nor viewership of the channels on which the two programmes are broadcast. As a result, the news of its ban went largely unreported in the mainstream press. So while the Ministry’s backdoor watershed may herald a new maturity in its dealings with the media, the double standards indicate that it is handling this whole growing up business the same way a lot of us did: with reluctance, ambivalence and ill-humour.