Summary: <br> Fergal Mulligan is the Programme Director at National Broadband Plan at the Department of Communications.<br> <br> <br> <br> *****<br> <br> <br> <br> That’s audio from an Egyptian news channel called Extra news, it’s in Arabic of course. That clip is 17 seconds long, and it’s a news item that, in Arabic, contained 42 words. As I understand it, it was broadcast only once on Extra News, the exact same number of times that it was broadcast on all other Egyptian news channels. <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> And with the exact same text. To the word.<br> And, every Egyptian newspaper ran the same story, 42 words long, word for word.<br> <br> <br> <br> The news was about the death of Mohamed<br> Morsi. Morsi was the first, and so far only, democratically elected president<br> of Egypt. He won the 2012 elections after the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tahrir_Square" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">Tahrir Square</a> protests,<br> part of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_revolution_of_2011" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">Arab<br> Spring</a> uprising and that swept through the Arab world nearly a decade ago<br> now.<br> <br> <br> <br> The Arab Spring was a protest by a mixture<br> of people, democrats, liberals, economic reformists, and Islamists who were<br> against the corrupt elites that ruled – and in many cases still rule – the Arab<br> countries. The Egyptian army, the real controlling force in the country, saw<br> the way things were going, deposed the longtime dictator, and allowed largely<br> free elections.<br> <br> <br> <br> They didn’t go to script. Morsi led the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_and_Justice_Party_(Egypt)" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer">Freedom<br> and Justice Party</a>, and organization affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood.<br> The party weren’t Islamic extremists, they confirmed that they were happy for<br> women and Egypt’s minority Christians to serve in government, but they were by<br> no means what people who wanted Egypt to move towards the western democratic<br> model would have hoped for, although he seemed to be firmly against corruption.<br> <br> <br> <br> He lasted a year. The Army, which controls<br> a huge chunk of the Egyptian economy, with zero oversight, staged a coup,<br> arrested Morsi, and have imprisoned him ever since, on a whole series of<br> charges. He was on trial last month for those charges when he died, apparently<br> of a heart attack.<br> <br> <br> <br> This is how the Egyptian media announced<br> his death. They all carried an identical 42-word announcement that named him<br> and said he had died, and nothing more, they didn’t even refer to the fact that<br> he had been president, much less on trial by the military.<br> <br> <br> <br> Every single news outlet waited three days,<br> long after the death had been reported internationally, before they ran the<br> story, and they all used the same text. With one exception – this clip from<br> Extra News. Can you hear a familiar word at the end?<br> <br> <br> <br> That’s right. The word is Samsung. The extra sentence that this<br> newsreader added on the end translates as ‘sent<br> from a Samsung device’ – like the default signature on the phone of people<br> who aren’t smart enough to not make their every email into an ad for an<br> electronics company.<br> <br> <br> <br> And like the TV news stations that aren’t<br> even smart enough to copy and paste the right text they get telling them what<br> news to broadcast.<br> <br> <br> <br> Aren’t we lucky to live in a democracy<br> where the TV news producers are smarter than that.<br>
