Greg Shupak has a PhD in Literary Studies and teaches Media Studies at the University of Guelph in Toronto. He regularly writes analysis of politics and media for outlets including Electronic Intifada, In These Times, Jacobin, and the website Fairness and accuracy in reporting.

His book, The Wrong Story Palestine, Israel, And The Media is available from OR Books.

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That’s audio from an Egyptian news channel called Extra news, it’s in Arabic of course. That clip is 17 seconds long, and it’s a news item that, in Arabic, contained 42 words. As I understand it, it was broadcast only once on Extra News, the exact same number of times that it was broadcast on all other Egyptian news channels.

And with the exact same text. To the word.

And, every Egyptian newspaper ran the same story, 42 words long, word for word.

The news was about the death of Mohamed

Morsi. Morsi was the first, and so far only, democratically elected president

of Egypt. He won the 2012 elections after the Tahrir Square protests,

part of the Arab

Spring uprising and that swept through the Arab world nearly a decade ago

now.

The Arab Spring was a protest by a mixture

of people, democrats, liberals, economic reformists, and Islamists who were

against the corrupt elites that ruled – and in many cases still rule – the Arab

countries. The Egyptian army, the real controlling force in the country, saw

the way things were going, deposed the longtime dictator, and allowed largely

free elections.

They didn’t go to script. Morsi led the Freedom

and Justice Party, and organization affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood.

The party weren’t Islamic extremists, they confirmed that they were happy for

women and Egypt’s minority Christians to serve in government, but they were by

no means what people who wanted Egypt to move towards the western democratic

model would have hoped for,