Visualizing Egypt: Uncovering Media Manipulation

Visualizing Egypt: Uncovering Media Manipulation

Visualizing Egypt: Uncovering Media Manipulation

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[The following press release and infographic was issued by Visualizing Egypt on World Press Freedom Day 2015]

Throughout the last two years, Egypt has witnessed a renewed state of media censorship, some aspects of which are reminiscent of the regime before the revolution, while others are new in scope and mode. Through the power of state institutions, impunity for those that assault media workers, editorial pressure and a consolidated media ownership, a new practice of censorship has taken root, while older methods have also persisted. In an attempt to document the structure of censorship in Egypt,Visualizing Impact andMada Masr collaborated in creating a series of visuals, the first of which will be released on World Press Freedom Day (3 May, 2015), and tells the story of how media freedoms are curbed today. 

The first infographic from Visualizing Egypt was released on World Press Freedom Day 2015 and is available to republish under a Creative Commons license:

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In this first visual, we navigate censorship practices and their function in preventing message dissemination.‘Shadowed Signals’ aggregates information from the reports of media monitoring organizations, local and international press, to paint a visual metaphor of how real world events are filtered or blacked-out altogether. The visual raises the salient point that mainstream press (both state-run and privately owned) are susceptible to, or complicit in, the muting and manipulating of messages before they are ever even broadcast. 

For the last two decades,and in parallel with the liberalization of the media industry in Egypt, censorship has systemically materialized in formal and informal ways. On the formal level, the state has used its sovereign capacity, ranging from legal instruments, such as constitutional clauses and  media bills, to pose challenges to independent media practice. The prosecution of journalists and closure of media outlets through these instruments have rendered these legal instruments effective tools for the suppression of speech.

The last two years have seen no exception in the use of legal instruments to limit media freedoms. The 2014 Constitution holds several clauses limiting media freedoms, in addition to already existing legislation. This intensive harassment through the judiciary has deterred many other journalists from addressing stories deemed sensitive, or exposing regime-sanctioned violations.

These chilling effects have shaped what arguably constitutes the larger portion of censorship, namely informal censorship, or soft censorship, which plays a large role in limiting speech. But the other significant aspect of self-censorship resides in its being a product of deliberate alignment with the ruling regime. State-run media aside, many corporate media outlets have vowed allegiance to the current authorities, a function of Egypt’s polarized politics in the last two years.

Besides self-censorship, taming actual voices is another major form of informal censorship. The disappearance of critical voices from the media landscape, be it guests on TV shows, op-ed writers in newspapers, or actual journalists, has created gaps in coverage. While the full circumstances behind these disappearances remain unknown in most cases, reports on TV black lists of activists, and failure to renew contractual agreements with some columnists and hosts, point to a desire to silence them.

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In our next visual, we will look into a timeline of media development in Egypt, and the parallel evolution of censorship regimes. Finally, we will examine the infrastructure of media ownership and governance, with a quest to determine the root causes of persisting censorship. 

About

Visualizing Impact (VI) is a laboratory for innovation at the intersection of data science, technology, and design. VI creates impactful tools highlighting critical social issues around the world by leveraging data science, technology, and design to mainstream marginalized perspectives on critical social issues.

Mada Masr is a two-year old media organization, producing in-depth content about Egypt in Arabic and English. It was born with the aim to create a fully independent and sustainable media model and while pursuing this goal, it constantly examines and questions the media ecosystem in which it is functioning.

Visualizing Egypt is a collaboration between Visualizing Impact and Mada Masr, where the former’s expertise in concept-driven designs and artistic direction and the latter’s local knowledge and conceptual edge, bring together seminal narratives on crucial issues.

 

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Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412