Al-Masry Al-Youm forced to rescind interview with security agent

The privately owned Al-Masry Al-Youm newspaper was prevented from distributing a print issue of Tuesday evening's paper by the government, as it included a sensitive interview with an intelligence agent.

According to the chief editor of the news portal, Ahmad Ragab, the government wanted to review the interview before it was published, in order to make sure no sensitive information was included. When Al-Masry Al-Youm refused to show them the interview, they confiscated the issues from the state-owned Al-Ahram printing offices.

Ragab stated that the interview would nevertheless be published online on Wednesday or Thursday.

When asked in a phone interview with Mada Masr if he saw the government’s actions as censorship, Ragab replied, “Definitely! This is not good for press freedom. This is harsher than under Mubarak’s regime. In Mubarak’s time this didn’t happen.”

He explained that the current regime focuses more on controlling the media because “they know the danger the media can pose for them. After three years of unrest in Egypt, they are aware of the important role the media can play in changing opinions.”

Ragab said Al-Masry Al-Youm would continue to fight censorship despite government efforts at control, adding that they had continued with the publishing process even though they received three phone calls asking them not to.

In the end the government was forced to go to Al-Ahram's printers to stop the interview from being published. “They can control print,” he said. “We lost around 40,000 issues yesterday.”

The incident at Al-Masry Al-Youm is one of several recent attempts to censor and control journalism in recent months. 

In early September, rights organizations condemned the detention of Al-Masry Al-Youm journalist, Mahmoud Nasser, who was arrested on suspicion of filming in a military zone.

A report published by the media watch group, the Support Center for Information Technology (SCIT), stated that there were 581 cases of the violation of press freedoms in 2013. According to the report, attacks on media freedoms — by both supporters of the former president and the state — doubled following the ouster of Morsi.

Egypt also ranks globally as one of the worst states for imprisoning journalists, according to a study released by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) in December 2013. According to the study, Egypt is ranked ninth on the list, which is topped by Turkey, Iran and China.