Goodbye, Al-Masry Al-Youm
by Sarah Carr, Egypt Independent, April 26, 2013
In 2010, Abdel Moneim Saeed, then the chairperson of state mouthpiece Al-Ahram, oversaw an outrageous bit of Photoshopping on the newspaper’s front cover, when US President Barack Obama was replaced with Hosni Mubarak at the head of a group of leaders striding out of a meeting in Washington.
This Photoshop-gate inspired the inevitable deluge of derision on social media. As well as being breathtaking and hilarious in its own right, it was a bit of light relief from the tense and strange months leading up to the revolution and, in particular, another photo that went viral in 2010 thanks to social media — that of the mutilated corpse of Khaled Saeed.
Al-Ahram’s big cheeses remained belligerent in the face of the ridicule. Its editor-in-chief, Osama Saraya, described it as an “expressionist†photograph that gave a “brief, live and true expression of the prominent stance of President Mubarak in the Palestinian issue.â€
In a 2010 interview with Al-Ahram Weekly, Abdel Moneim Saeed, meanwhile, insisted that the paper did nothing wrong, condemning the “herd mentality†that dominated the response to the picture and pointed out that the Economist “often employs graphics, pictures and illustrations to make its point.â€
According to the weekly, Saeed was particularly piqued by the fact that nobody had bothered to read the report below the Photoshopping, penned by him.
He also lamented that “some in this profession mix opinion with news, thus becoming the jury and the judge. We have a long way to go on the road to advanced journalism.â€
Coming from the man who ran Al-Ahram for almost four years, this statement is extraordinary. It is like a mosquito complaining about buzzing noises. Al-Ahram, like virtually all state press in Egypt, has wildly — shall we say, “expressionist†— content. It gives itself the license to report the news as it appears in the daydreams of whoever is Egypt’s most influential player on any given day, and the public purse funds this. Continue reading Al-Masry al-Youm wa-la-bukra