CAIRO, 28 August 2005 — Egypt’s media has offered overwhelmingly fawning coverage of President Hosni Mubarak’s re-election bid but watchdogs have also taken heart in the positive effects of the country’s first competitive campaign. “Most governmental papers effectively acted as PR for the ruling (National Democratic) party and repeatedly attacked his (Mubarak’s) main rivals,” said the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies in a report released yesterday.
It based its report on the monitoring of four state-owned and two independent television stations as well as a total of 17 newspapers, covering the first week after the Aug. 17 start of the campaign.
Until now, Egyptians had only been able to say yes or no to a single candidate picked by the NDP-dominated Parliament. On Sept. 7, the country will hold its first pluralist presidential election.
Mubarak, who has ruled since 1981, is widely expected to win a fifth six-year term. Ghad party leader Ayman Nour and Wafd chairman Numan Gumaa lead a pack of nine challengers. Another coalition of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), the National Campaign for the Monitoring of Elections, said that on average more than half the political coverage even before the campaign kicked off was dedicated to Mubarak in the country’s top three state-owned newspapers. Mubarak was even ahead of his competitors in independent newspapers, securing 31 percent of the election coverage in Al-Masri Al-Yom against 27 percent for Numan Gumaa, the leader of the liberal Wafd party.
The Egyptian Ministry of Information states clearly in its coverage rules that its media outlets will “provide information on presidential candidates in an equal and neutral manner.”
“The main goals of state media coverage of the electoral process shall include ... providing news coverage of the activities of all candidates ... presenting all candidates and their programs,” the ministry said.
The independent Shayfeencom NGO, whose name means “We Are Watching You” in Arabic, pointed out that the top-selling Al-Ahram daily has carried a large picture of Mubarak on its front page every day since the launch of the campaign.
“We received so many complaints against Al-Ahram that we decided to carry out a survey,” Shayfeencom founder Ghada Shahbender told AFP, deploring that coverage of Mubarak’s nine election rivals had been relegated to the inside pages.
The state-owned Al-Gomhuriya daily carried a full-page ad on the paper’s back cover showing Mubarak wearing dark aviator sunglasses in front of a montage of the Sphinx, the Pyramids, an Egyptian flag and the setting sun.
