By Rania Al Malky
The Feb. 12, 2011 edition of state-owned Al-Ahram daily is a collector’s item.
After nearly six decades of performing its loyal role as apologist for successive totalitarian regimes, earnest publicist of the head of state and mouthpiece for his ruling party, culminating three weeks of deliberate misinformation about Egyptian demonstrators demanding the fall of the regime, Al-Ahram’s front page headline said in big, bold, red font: “The people toppled the regime.”
The celebratory tone of the lead story; the 180 degree shift in editorial line, praising Egypt’s valiant revolution and going above and beyond the call of duty (even bordering defamation in the process) to vilify anyone remotely connected with the previous “decadent” regime, whose praises Al-Ahram had sung for a living on a daily basis, has begged numerous questions about credibility and ethics.
But ethics aside, the pressing question today is what to do with Egypt’s dinosaur press institutions and its mammoth state-owned broadcast media?
Suffering from rampant corruption and over-employment, the state-owned media as a whole is in dire need of a complete structural overhaul. According to thousands of protesters in front of the TV building in Maspero last week, it is also in need of a long-overdue “cleansing” of over-paid top figures whose corrupt practices have mired their institutions in debt reaching billions of pounds, not to mention their moral and ethical bankruptcy revealed in the weeks of Egypt’s popular revolt, when the media spread propaganda accusing protesters of receiving bribes by foreign infiltrators.
According to Ahmed El-Naggar, researcher at Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies, there are three main areas where sweeping change is necessary in Al-Ahram, Al-Akhbar and Al-Gomhuria, the biggest state-owned newspapers in Egypt.
“The ownership model, the method by which the chairman of the board of directors and the editors-in-chief are selected, and hierarchy of financial oversight (which previously led to rampant corruption) and revenue distribution must all change,” says El-Naggar.
When he was elected to the board of Al-Ahram in 2005, the newspaper was in debt to the tune of LE 669 million and owed LE 3 billion in taxes to the Finance Ministry, he says. “Even though the 36 percent tax on ad revenues was exaggerated, it could have been negotiated, but not written off completely. Even the employees’ social fund was stolen,” says El-Naggar.
The losses incurred by the Egyptian Radio and Television Union (ERTU), weighed down by over 40,000 employees and notoriously corrupt practices have been the subject of numerous damning financial reports. Only days before the outbreak of the January 25 Revolution, the Peoples’ Assembly’s culture and information committees discussed a Central Auditing Agency document revealing that ERTU had incurred a total of LE11 billion in losses.
Within days of ex-president Mubarak stepping down, the Ministry of Information as a whole was cancelled, as its ex-minister Anas El-Fikki was arrested pending investigation into misappropriation of public funds for spending close to LE 36 million in media campaigns and promotions on behalf of the former ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) prior to the rigged November 2010 parliamentary elections.
Almost two months on, media workers are still demanding the removal of appointed head of ERTU, also tainted by his association with the NDP, as well as the heads of other departments and editors-in-chief of national newspapers, whose continued presence on the scene contradicts veiled promises to have them removed by the ruling army council.
A microcosm of events on the wider social and political scene in Egypt, Al-Ahram and ERTU share similar realties and challenges.
El-Naggar explains how the editorial leadership of state-run newspapers, because of their political affiliation with the regime, was responsible for shelving reports by the Central Auditing Agency which documented epidemic financial transgressions.
The relationship between the chairman of the board of Al-Ahram Abdel Moneim Saeid, for instance, says El-Naggar, and steel mogul and NDP hawk Ahmed Ezz, the former president’s son Gamal Mubarak and former Trade and Industry Minister Rachid Mohamed Rachid, has turned him into a mouthpiece for the government.
“In contravention with all journalistic codes of ethics, Saeid was a consultant for Rachid in his capacity as trade minister,” he added.
El-Naggar says that it was literally like going to war to get our hands on financial documents. “The resistance was out of fear exposure,” he says.
Choosing editors and heads of boards of directors: traditionally, the state chose these people through the Shoura Council’s higher press council. Always the choices were of “corruption symbols” as editors in chief or heads of boards who were not popularly accepted like Abdel Moneim Saeid.
Moving forward, El-Naggar says that the mechanism of choosing future leaderships must change, while bearing in mind that these institutions will continue to be state-owned.
“The state can nominate five candidates for chairman and editor-in-chief and employees can choose between them,” he proposes.
Media finances
Regarding the ownership model itself, he completely dismisses the idea of privatizing the state-owned media, claiming that an Eastern Europe-style takeover by the “mafia” would be inevitable.
His solution is for the employees to own these institutions.
“Privately-held non-traded stocks would be given to employees. Upon retirement, they would receive the value and profit of their shares which can only be transferred to new employees. The state could own a certain percentage of the overall shares, say one third, and against those share retain the right to appoint two members of the board of directors, while the remaining 10 must be elected,” suggests El-Naggar, emphasizing that state ownership of this percentage must come with no strings attached and with “indisputable guarantees” of editorial independence.
Currently, six members of the board and the chairman are appointed by the state while six are elected, two print workers, two administrators and two journalists.
Of the 11,000 Al-Ahram employees only 1,500 are journalists, 1,800 ad salesmen and the rest are administrative, print and distribution workers.
With ten times the staff requirements in some departments, El-Naggar says that this masked unemployment is a result of decades of arbitrary hiring mostly to secure votes in Journalists’ Syndicate elections by loyalists.
“Firing staff is out of the question, however, but there must be a complete moratorium on new hires or temporary employees,” he says.
The issue of extreme salary discrepancies has also been at the core of employee grievances in all state media, but, as El-Naggar says, is intricately linked with corruption.
“Officially the salary of the previous editor-in-chief of Al-Ahram Ibrahim Nafei was LE 380,000 per month. This was what is documented and includes his commission from ad sales … a commission which he set for himself and that is not paid in accordance with any by-laws, since it constitutes a clear conflict of interest.
“The numbers that are not documented, however, but are the elephant in the room, are the commissions he received for paper procurement and the distribution of other newspapers, for instance… the editor makes a commission on every penny that moves into the institution,” he says.
But corrupt practices and the violation of basic journalistic codes of ethics are not restricted to those holding leading positions.
The illegal an unethical practice of selling ads by reporters and blurring the distinction between editorial content and advertorial material is widely practiced by local journalists mainly because there was no supervision. On the contrary, the media institutions would sometimes use beat reporters to pressure advertisers/sources to take out ads, against which the reporters received commissions in the form of “expenses.”
Huge wage discrepancies resulting from such practices have led to a twisted situation where clean, ethical journalists have became the “proletariat of the institution,” says El-Naggar, often earning less — at times as little as LE 3,000 after 25 years — than ad salesmen or even print workers who sell ads or collect on the side.
“While ad salesmen represent 13 percent of employees in Al-Ahram, they consume 45 percent of the revenues. The remaining 87 percent, including journalists, share 55 percent of the revenues.
“Only a more equitable distribution of revenue through fair salaries and strict supervision of journalists conduct can solve this problem,” says El-Naggar, who earlier this month updated and re-submitted a file on corruption he had previously presented to the Prosecutor General and the Illicit Gains Office in 2006.
The syndicate issue
Unraveling the quagmire of Egypt’s state-owned media institutions, however, cannot take place in isolation of solving the current stalemate at the 6,000-member Journalists’ Syndicate, where the former chairman, Makram Mohamed Ahmed, stigmatized by his open loyalty to the state, was forced to resign and five of 12 board walked out, aspiring for a fresh start.
As it continues to remain in limbo because of insufficient quorum in several general assembly meetings to set a date for new chairman and board elections, the fate of the syndicate is yet unclear. But that does not mean that the syndicate doesn’t have its work cut out for it.
According Abeer Saadi, former member of the syndicate board who resigned, some 186 laws inhibit freedom to report and journalists can be tried before a military court and face up to 15 years in prison.
Article 308 of the Penal Code, for instance, imposes a minimum jail sentence of six months on journalists whose articles “comprise an attack against the dignity and honor of individuals, or an outrage of the reputation of families,” while Article 179 and 102 respectively, allow the detention of “whoever affronts the president of the republic,” and “whoever deliberately diffuses news, information/data, or false or tendentious rumors, or propagates exciting publicity, if this is liable to disturb public security, spread horror among the people, or cause harm or damage to the public interest.”
According to many reports by human rights and press freedom groups, such vague and elastic provisions in Egypt’s Press Law invite abuse and infringe international standards of freedom of expression
The struggle to change such media-stifling laws which systematically relegate serious journalistic endeavors to the realm of publishing offences has been on-going. It lies squarely on the shoulders of the syndicate, whose ineffective previous role on the scene as a result of coercion by the state, must be activated, both to ensure the protection of journalists and their abidance by basic journalistic codes of ethics which have unfortunately been compromised in what many reporters believe has become a media circus, devoid of any accountability, accuracy or professionalism.
Popular TV hosts like Hamdi Qandil have suggested that similar challenges facing the broadcast media can be met with a BBC-style regulatory body to oversee the ERTU as well as a public ownership model that will rely on advertising revenue for funding, instead of state coffers.
For now, it’s all up in the air.
