Shahira Amin was on her way to work on Thursday morning when she was suddenly overcome by the urge to stop her car and send her boss at Nile TV a text message declaring that she was quitting.The day before, on February 2, Amin was in Tahrir Square and witnessed firsthand the violence that occurred on Black Wednesday. Hired thugs wielding swords and whips had stormed into the peaceful crowd in Tahrir on horses and camels, as other thugs began firing live ammunition and Molotov cocktails from the roofs of neighboring buildings. Amin says that night, as the deputy head and senior anchor for the state-owned channel Nile TV, she was forced to report that peace had been restored.
“I felt that these young activists were calling for our freedom,” says Amin. “I would be betraying them by being the mouthpiece of a regime that does this to its people, by being a part of their propaganda.”
And just like that, Amin threw away almost 20 years of her career with a text message that read: “I’m on the side of the people.”
Throughout the events that followed January 25, state television showed little to no coverage of the protests taking place just down the Corniche from their building in Maspero. Instead, the state-run channels projected a false sense of stability by airing a wide-angle shot of the capital that showed a light flow of traffic across the Sixth of October Bridge, which ignored any Tahrir protesters or clashes taking place on the street below.
“They weren’t covering Tahrir, they were covering pro-Mubarak rallies, making these young protesters seem like they were causing instability, that they were traitors with foreign agendas, instead of acknowledging that they were there for freedom,” says Amin.
“As a journalist, I felt I would be losing my credibility,” she adds. However, toward the end of the 18-day revolution, state television began changing its approach to coverage. On February 12, the day after former President Hosni Mubarak resigned, talk-show host Mahmoud Saad turned to Channel 2 after being forced to take “an unpaid leave” for announcing on the January 25 episode of his show Masr El-Naharda, (Egypt Today) that Mubarak should step down.
Another milestone came February 18 when Saad El-Katatney was interviewed on Channel 2 as the official spokesperson for the Muslim Brotherhood. It was the first time a member of the group, banned under the previous regime, had appeared on state TV in an official capacity.
Abdel-Latif El-Minawy, head of the news department at state television, appeared on Masr El-Naharda on February 17, sounding apologetic for what had been broadcast during the 18 days of the revolution. He revealed that a “higher authority” had given him strict orders on what to cover, adding that they had asked him not to have any cameras pointed towards Tahrir Square on Black Wednesday.
Despite the seemingly more open coverage, some are still doubtful over whether or not state television will ever regain its credibility. Naila Hamdy, a professor of journalism at the American University in Cairo who has 15 years of experience in international television news, says state television had promised to reform their coverage policies before, but took major steps backward during the revolution.
“During this crisis, they reverted back to a method that was highly unusual that I haven’t seen since the 1960s during Al-Naksa,” she says, referring to the 1967 war between Israel and Egypt, Syria and Jordan where state television falsely led the Egyptian people to believe that Egypt had won the fight against Israel. “They did lose a lot of credibility, and even if they tried to be objective, it will take a long time to win their audience back.”
Hamdy suggests that the concept of state television itself should be dissolved, and that its employees should be retrained to produce a new product in the end.
Amin agrees, saying that she would love to go back to working for Nile TV but needs to see a real shift occurs. “Corruption is so deeply entrenched in that building, just like other state institutions […] even if I go back right now. it’s more of the same,” says Amin. “We’ve seen the light but there’s a lot of work to be done.” |
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