Egypt: press bias during the presidential campaign

Egypt's unprecedented presidential election campaign has ended with reports from several organizations casting doubts over the lack of neutrality and objectivity of both the state and private media. A report issued on 29 August by the Egyptian Organization of Human Rights (EOHR) raised issues on the neutrality of the committee supervising the presidential elections in Egypt.

Hafiz Abu-Sa'dah, secretary-general of the EOHR, said at a news conference that the organization had noticed that the national newspapers were not neutral in dealing with the candidates, that they supported the National Democratic Party's candidate President Hosni Mubarak and denied support to the nine other candidates. He added that state television was biased at the beginning, but it became neutral when criticism was made against it earlier on in the campaign.

For example, the independent daily newspaper Al-Misri al-Yawm, currently one of the most popular papers on Egyptian news stands, monitored the government press, namely, Al-Ahram, Al-Akhbar and Al-Jumhuriyah's coverage of the activities of the 10 presidential candidates in their editions on 22 August. It concluded that a total of 13,878 words on the day were devoted to the activities of Mubarak and, in contrast, the coverage given to the other candidates did not exceed 3,000 words.

Media observers in Egypt attributed this to the fact that the editors of these government newspapers, who have recently been appointed, wanted to demonstrate their loyalty to President Mubarak, who himself had the final say in nominating them. The performance of the national newspapers prompted many observers to say they had failed in the test with radio and television.

One of these is Dr Sami al-Sharif, media professor at the University of Cairo and one of the members of the committee charged with laying the media criteria for coverage of the presidential elections. "This experience in Egypt is new and unprecedented and shows a new visualization for the role of the official media of various hues in election coverage", he said.

Source: BBC monitoring and the Egyptian Organization of Human Rights (EOHR)