Prominent political figure and former member of parliament Adel Basel announced on Monday evening that the administration of the privately run channel Rotana Masriya informed him of the suspension of his talk show.
The show, titled “Akher Al Osboa” (End of the week) is a daily political programme that ran from Saturday to Wednesday.
Moreover, the channel decided to cancel another weekly political programme named “Men Al-Akhir” (In a nutshell) presented by young anchor Mohamed El-Aqabi.
According to a statement published on Basel’s official Twitter account, the reasons behind the suspension are still unknown.
Sources from inside the channel told Daily News Egypt on condition of anonymity on Tuesday that the channel is planning to follow a new editorial policy.
“The recent suspensions are due to radical changes in the strategy currently being followed by the channel’s administration,” the sources said. “The new policy is to focus on entertainment and to ignore Egyptian political and economic conditions.”
The sources said that the shows’ suspensions coincided with the start of the new year because the new editorial policy was also slated to be implemented at the start of the year.
“The channel is going to start practising self-censorship on the content they provide to the audience,” the sources noted.
Rotana Masryia is being financed by Saudi renowned businessman Walid Ben Talal.
This comes as the local privately owned Al Qahera Wel Nas TV channel also ended the show of well-known journalist and TV anchor Ibrahim Eissa on 1 January.
Although Eissa claimed in a statement later that he had decided to leave TV work for a while, he stated that viewers’ attention and interaction with his programme titled “With Ibrahim Eissa” was “pressured.” Eissa did not clarify what he meant by “pressured.”
