Year: 2009
Type: article
Abstract: Pressured by the Bush administration to expand democratic freedoms following 9/11, the government of Egypt four years ago granted a group of private businessmen a license to publish Almasry Alyoum, the first independent daily in Egypt in a half century. Hisham Kassem, the founding publisher, suspects the government assumed the start-up whose name translates as “The Daily Egyptian” would fail, so issuing a license would placate an important ally without threatening the state-run media’s dominance. Instead, Almasry has thrived. A year later, the government licensed another independent daily published by a partnership of the International Herald Tribune, the Daily Star of Lebanon and a second group of Egyptian businessmen. Technically, the license authorized the publication of the Daily Star Egypt as an insert into a foreign newspaper, the IHT, the global daily based in Paris. Published in English, the Daily Star, which changed its name to the Daily News in 2007 after the Lebanese partner dropped out, would have a self-limited circulation and therefore not present a significant challenge to Arabic state-run media.[iii] But publishing in English also would make the paper accessible to more of the diplomatic corps in Cairo and to cosmopolitan elites in the United States and other Western countries—potential trouble for a government sensitive about its image abroad for diplomatic and economic reasons.
Source: Arab Media and Society.
DOI: 10.70090/kjc09ppe
Author: Kenneth J. Cooper
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4402989916