Written Task - An Egyptian bloggers view on the medias performance in the revolution

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Rowand Helmi        Written task 1        English L&L HL

Best of: Egyptian Media Propaganda.

An Egyptian blogger’s view on the media’s performance in the revolution’s 18 days:

One the many failures of the Egyptian former regime has been its state media. Never mind that we have press laws that restrict the freedom of the independent (or rather striving to be independent) media. The state owned media, and it’s private extensions such as the Mehwar Channel and Masriya TV, were consistently used as propaganda machines promoting the Mubarak regime. They became increasingly desperate in an attempt to save it from falling. Their news reporting consisted of biased, exaggerated and in many cases plain false and misleading information. Sadly the Egyptian public believes them as they have no other alternative. Most Egyptians are too poor and uneducated to know better. Throughout the 18 days and even before that this was the norm, so only the very extreme cases of ridiculousness stood out.

Nile TV:

The state media used fake “eye witnesses” to “report” on the protests and the situation in the square in an attempt to discredit them and sound credible. For example, a pseudo-reporter named Tamer. He called Nile News channel an Egyptian state owned channel where he claimed that he “just escaped from the vicious place of Tahrir Square”; words like “vicious” are used as pathos to play up to the fears of the middle class that young protesters want to “ruin” the country (as he says later) by creating chaos and toppling the regime. He went on explaining how he had to run away because they were keeping anyone that wanted to leave “hostage”; this was again used to discourage people from going and seeing what is going on in Tahrir themselves as they would be “hostages”.

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He also calls the protesters “thugs” in an attempt to justify how the police force dealt violently with them, the use of such emotional words like “thugs” and “hostage” was a part of the state’s strategy to win over the mass population’s sympathy before the protesters could, making it so much easier to crush the uprising. Ironically, the state actually sent real thugs to beat the protesters and harass them. He starts of the call by sobbing while saying: “with all these protests the country is now in ruins”, pathetically using pathos to get people’s sympathy, making it seem ...

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