Results matching “egypt newspaper”

Free daily newspapers have a "marginal" market presence in Africa, when compared to other continents. According to Newspaper Innovation, free dailies are only published in Botswana, South Africa, Egypt and Morocco and their circulation is "rather low."

A number of independent newspapers have appeared in Egypt over the last few years. The most prominent of these is the daily Al Masry Al Youm, which in 2004 was the first independent political daily to receive a publication license in Egypt since 1958. The paper has become the country's fourth largest daily, with a claimed circulation of over 50,000 copies. Al Amsry Al Youm is widely viewed as "the most professional newspaper in Egypt," and established its position as fourth largest daily partially through a television campaign promoting itself as an independent and professional publication.

As a result of our former survey about the number of newspapers which published the Danish Mohammed cartoons, it appears that there were not two or three but twelve different ways to cover the story:

1) No reproduction of the cartoons but a short text describing them and no link to the cartoons in the website. It was the choice of more than 1,400 American newspapers.

2) No reproduction of the cartoons but link to the cartoons (often Wikipedia) in the website. It implies a certain sense of hypocrisy - are the online readers more clever than the usual readers? - but many English newspapers thought it was relevant.

 The Editors' Weblog has compiled a provisional list of the newspapers that have printed some or all of the cartoons since 30 September 2005, date of publication of 12 cartoons of the prophet Mohammed in Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten. Even provisional, this list is the most exhaustive on the internet, thanks to members of the World Editors Forum and to bloggers close to the EW.

The main conclusions are:

- to our knowledge, more than 130 national or local newspapers (excluding the student newspapers and online publications) published some or all of the 12 cartoons (sometimes just a pohtography) in approximately 50 countries . It also means that around 1,7% of the dailies around the world - 8,300 paid-for dailies according to World Press Trends 2005 - made the difficult decision to publish the cartoons.

- Europe was the continent where the most newspapers published the cartoons: at least 70 papers. It is not surprising that the Netherlands was the country most involved in the controversy (after Denmark)... a few months after the assassination of the film maker Theo Van Gogh by an Islamist activist. Same thing in France after the veil debate and the November 2005 riots.

- Within Europe, the first publications to reprint the cartoons in January-February 2006 were in general right-wing publications, for example ABC in Spain, Die Welt in Germany and Corriere della Sera in Italy. Then more leftist publications followed suit, for example Libération and Le Monde in France.

- Surprisingly, Arab and Muslim newspapers were also involved in the controversy from the very beginning, with the first reprint on 17 October 2005 (see below)! More than 12 Arab and/or Muslim newspapers published the cartoons. The decision to publish provoked terrible consequences for the editors-in-chief of these publications. Same consequences for some directors of television in Sudan and Algeria. 

- How to define the position adopted by American, British, Canadian and Australian newspapers? Media responsability, political correctness or self-censorship? The most surprising is not the position defined in many editorials (from The New York Times to The Guardian), but this strange impression of unanimity and consensus: only three regional newspapers on more than 1,400 newspapers in the States and zero newspaper, but a student daily in the UK for taking the risk...

- And what in the rest of the world? Nothing. Almost the desert for the publication of the cartoons in the Americas (apart Brazil), Africa (apart South Africa) and above all Asia (apart New Zealand). As if this controversy was only between Europe and the Arab world and if blasphemy was still relevant in regions as Asia and the Americas: not only about Mohammed, but about all religious issues.

My conclusion: the geography of the publication of the Danish cartoons tells us a lot about our democracies: what is allowed, what is forbidden... and what is taboo. In fact, it's more geopolitics than geography!

Online journalist Ahmed Mahmoud Abdallah, currently editor of the news site Balady Net and formerly editor of the now extinct opposition newspaper Al-Shaab, has been arrested by Egyptian state security agents. His work has been confiscated and his website closed down.