The Listening Post

Egypt: Morsi, the military and the media

The country’s new civilian administration is fighting to establish its authority in a new media landscape.

Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s president, has been in the job for less than a month, but has already found himself caught up in a battle with the country’s state media. The power struggle between the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) and President Morsi is being played out in the front pages of the country’s newspapers and on its television screens.

Private media outlets, which have taken off since the fall of Hosni Mubarak, are growing in numbers and becoming more opinionated than ever. State-owned media meanwhile have been accused of favouring the military over their new leader.

In this week’s News Divide, we look at the stand-off between Egypt’s new civilian administration and a state-owned media that continues to be influenced by remnants of the old regime.

This week’s News Bytes: In Moscow, authorities charge a former policeman in connection with the murder of prominent Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya; WikiLeaks claims victory in a court battle against a US financial firm that imposed a blockade against the whistle-blowing site; and an Ethiopian court hands out tough sentences against six journalists in what critics are calling a blow to press freedom in the country.

Political street art

When you think of social media, you are likely to think of computers, mobile devices and sites like Facebook or Twitter. But there is one form that pre-dates it all – street art.

Street art came before television, radio and the printing press and remains a powerful tool of communication. The medium was used to great effect during the Arab revolutions, acting as an indicator of what people in the street were saying. And while demonstrators may have gone back to their lives after the fall of a government, street artists remain, making the most out of their new found freedom of expression.

In this week’s feature, the Listening Post’s Meenakshi Ravi looks at political street art, the low tech of end of social media.

YouTube has a lot of customers. According to the site, it attracted more than one trillion views last year. And by the time you have finished reading this paragraph, an additional 40 hours of content will have been uploaded to the site. So with that amount of interest, it is expected that the company will receive some complaints. But what about these dissatisfied customers? Where do they go if they have complaints about what happens with the videos they have posted? It is an idea that online satirists Barely Political explore in our web video of the week. We hope you enjoy the show!

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