“I’ve always wanted to be a reporter, even before the revolution,” she interjected.

“Have you changed your mind?” I asked.

“No,” she replied. “I still want to be a reporter. Not here, though, but for Al-Jazeera. They tell the truth!“

Meet 13-year old Huda Ibrahim, who, like so many Egyptians, looks to the foreign media for the truth. Even before the Jan. 25 protest movement began, Huda and her family have disregarded the news on local TV channels and newspapers. The inaccuracies of the local media’s coverage of the protesters, which have been exposed by the foreign media, has re-enforced this negative public sentiment.

“Friends told me something was going on in the streets,” said Magdi Abdelaal. “I called home and was told nothing was mentioned, not on TV or in that day’s papers. A few minutes later an overseas relative calls me up asking if the family and I are OK because an international news channel had reported that there were riots going on in Cairo! Can you believe that? And I’m the one living here!“

The media in Egypt started losing ground when the Tunisians began their revolt in December against their now-exiled leader Ben Ali. Instead of presenting the people with the facts in that coverage, the Egyptian media adhered to its government’s dismissive approach and downplayed the significance of the situation.

“They totally made light of what happened in Tunisia,” said Nagwa Mohammad. “If it hadn’t been for my nephew who had read about it online I would have been ‘the deaf person at a wedding.’“

Mubarak dismissed the Tunisian people’s revolt with local state press conveying his confidence that such occurrences would never happen in Egypt due to it “being a big, great country of 80 million people to which Tunis’s circumstances and conditions are inapplicable.”

His statement had also included the privilege of Egypt’s “freedom of the press” as another criteria that distinguished it from Tunisia.

When protests broke out in Cairo, including clashes with riot police, the Jan. 26 editions of local newspapers made no mention of them. Instead, they published pictures of amicable exchanges of chocolates and flowers between policemen and civilians.

“Once upon a time we used to pride ourselves for having the Arab world’s most liberal and controversial press,” said Sally Maher, a retired university lecturer who had recently returned from Europe.

Egypt’s local TV channels were no better, and perhaps even worse, than the print media.

While that fateful “Friday of Rage” on Jan. 28 claimed the lives and well-being of many Egyptians, national TV channels assured their viewers that “everything was a under control.” National security sources were given ample time on television to declare that all was stable and calm except for sporadic incidents of “foul play.”

“They treated us like idiots!” said Ahmad Beyumi. “As if we don’t have satellite TV!“

“And even without television,” he continued, “people have people.”

“Had it not been for the army suddenly showing up in the streets and the curfew they enforced, we would’ve believed them,” said Mervat Fahmi.

As a reaction to public outrage over the overt biases on the local media, various Egyptian broadcasters, men and women, have been busy explaining themselves — sometimes defensively, sometimes apologetically.

“We were misinformed,” said the hostess of a daytime TV program. “But my heart was in the right place.”

“My daughter and wife were verbally abused and aggressively treated when they went to join the protesters in Tahrir Square,” said another Egyptian TV presenter. “If this revolution is really about justice, then where’s the fairness in such behavior?” 

On Saturday, the first day after Mubarak’s exit from power, only one newspaper column touched on the issue of the compromised national media.

In the state-owned Al-Ahram newspaper, Emad Arbaan wrote: “Why do they believe Al-Jazeera and belie Egyptian television? Why do they trust Al-Arabiya and do not care for what Al-Nile channels say? ... Many questions, whose question we’ve not bothered to search for, but instead have restricted, confiscated, etc., media sources who tell the truth that angers us...”

Will Egypt ever believe its media again?