By Maurice Chammah 
 

On Feb. 3, 2011, senior news anchor and former deputy head of Nile TV Shahira Amin resigned from her post. Citing the channel’s refusal to cover the protests at Tahrir, she accused her station of siding with the regime of President Hosni Mubarak.
 
After Amin’s resignation, other journalists working for state television followed suit. TV host Hala Helmy has not appeared on air since Jan. 25, 2011, and went on to co-found the Media Revolutionaries Front, one of several groups protesting journalistic complicity in state media policies. This past February, these groups helped organize a rally of dozens of state journalists and producers outside the office of Information Minister General Ahmad Anis.
 
Critics have focused more on the overhaul of state television than on that of print outlets. But print media is also changing. The Journalists’ Syndicate (print journalists) has been increasingly critical of the regime since its last polls, and state newspaper coverage of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces has grown more cautiously critical. While it is too soon to assume direct connections between the syndicate’s statements and the changes in coverage by state papers, it is valuable to look at the two as part of a broader process of reforming the state media apparatus.
 
Before the Egyptian uprising, the allegiance of state media was clear. As the commentator Issandr al-Amrani argued in 2005, the three main state dailies – Al-Ahram (Egypt’s oldest Arabic-language newspaper), Al-Gomhoria (founded by Gamal Abdel-Nasser’s regime), and Al-Akhbar – had little editorial freedom and were “run as public mobilization tools whose essential role is to justify, explain and endorse the regime’s policies.”
 
During the uprising, all three state papers flipped their coverage from support of Mubarak to support of the uprisings. But in the months that followed, government papers worried that publishing accounts of military complicity in protesters’ deaths would bring about SCAF retaliation. This was especially relevant considering the widespread coverage of two flashpoint incidents that raised public ire toward the military government: the Maspero violence of Oct. 2011 and the Port Said football riot last February.
 
How the state press covered these two events, nearly four months apart, shows a subtle shift in the editorial policy of state-backed papers. Al-Akhbar’s coverage presents a stark example of the shifting landscape of permissible criticism of Egypt’s rulers – having moved closer in recent months to adopting a narrative of SCAF culpability.
 
After the violence at Maspero, Al-Akhbar suggested protesters had commandeered military vehicles and driven them into the crowds. But two days later SCAF Gen. Adel Emara said it was indeed soldiers who had driven the vehicles, though he believed the deaths were caused by the soldiers’ attempts to escape, rather than from a premeditated plan of massacre. Al-Akhbar had thus jumped the gun and had begun defending military leaders – who in turn, spun another story entirely.
 
The day after the Port Said riot, the paper’s version of events was far more measured, with a neutral headline: “Disaster in Port Said’s Stadium.” While back in October the editors had clung to a narrative acquitting the military – even at the risk of contradicting SCAF’s own statements days later – the same newspaper now went so far as to quote Samir Zaher, the head of the Egyptian Football Federation, accusing the SCAF of complicity in the episode.
 
Only the Sunday after the events did Al-Akhbar begin favoring the narratives put forth by Al-Ahram and Al-Gomhoria. This suggested that imprisoned members of the former regime had plotted the Port Said rioting, with headlines that read: “Two previous MPs, a police officer and a friend of Gamal Mubarak involved in Port Said.”
 
What happened between Maspero and Port Said to explain this shift? In the large, complex bureaucracy of the state newspaper system, it is difficult to draw direct lines of cause and effect, but it difficult to ignore the crucial elections to the Egyptian Journalists’ Syndicate. On Oct. 26, shortly after Maspero, the syndicate mobilized to hold its first polls since the resignation of Mubarak-era chairman Makram Mohammad Ahmad in late February – its first election free from the influence of the National Democratic Party.
 
According to Al-Ahram Weekly’s Khaled Dawoud, the Mubarak regime often supported one candidate and resorted to “legal trickery| – suspending voting and padding journalists’ salaries in order to get their preferred candidate elected chairman. This election, however, the two leading candidates were Yehia Qallash (supported by liberals and Nasserites) and Mamdouh al-Waly, a deputy editor of economic affairs for Al-Ahram. The latter was thought by many to be connected to the Muslim Brotherhood, but he repeatedly denied that he was the movement’s candidate.
 
Both Qallash and Waly stressed “freedom of expression” in their statements leading up to the election, and Waly’s eventual election as chairman was hailed by bloggers and journalists as a major benchmark – many noting that state-owned newspapers might break away from the ruling regime’s wishes under a more independent union. Once the Muslim Brotherhood conceded having lost the election (they ran five candidates), it became clear that Waly, despite being an ally, was not beholden to the group.
 
Immediately after elections, the Journalists’ Syndicate began issuing statements at odds with its previous political commitment to the regime. On Nov. 16, it condemned military trials for civilians, and on Nov. 21, it highlighted incidents of the detention and assault of independent- and state-backed journalists in Alexandria.
 
On Dec. 13, the syndicate denounced the arrest of two female journalists of the independent daily Al-Fagr for allegedly “violating the privacy” of a Muslim cleric. “We will not play the role of bystanders to the detention of journalists,” Waly declared. He called for new laws allowing the syndicate – not the public prosecutor – to be responsible for addressing breaches in journalistic ethics.
 
Through such statements Waly has been able to affect the public conversation on journalism. But it is unclear how influential his voice will be if it comes into conflict with the wishes of the Muslim Brotherhood, which forms a majority in both Parliament and the leadership of other professional syndicates (lawyers, engineers, doctors, and so on).
 
Furthermore, while state journalists no longer strictly follow the government’s narrative, reporters for state papers have spent decades practicing a form of journalism that supports the policies of the country’s leaders. However, Al-Akhbar’s recent exceptions to this rule and the new confidence of the journalists’ syndicate suggest some small – but significant – beginnings of change in the state press.
 
Maurice Chammah is a 2011-2012 U.S. Fulbright Fellow and a writer based in Cairo. He reports for The Daily News Egypt and maintains a blog, Adrift on the Nile. This commentary first appeared at Sada, an online journal published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.