The Immutable Attraction For Shuttering Media Outlets

Michael Hedges October 13, 2021 - Follow on Twitter

The ebb and flow of nations emerging from autocracy challenges observers, including international news reporters. The recent return of Taliban extremists to power in Afghanistan caught one and all by surprise. Apart from the dramatic two weeks in Kabul, there was little to tempt news organizations from investing the requisite effort to look beyond press releases and pretty pictures. After all, reporters on the ground are expensive.

The Arab Spring uprisings a decade ago brought down several authoritarian rulers in North Africa and the Middle East. Some observers offered that international news coverage shaped those uprisings by stressing common themes of corruption and inept national leaders. Certainly the Wikileaks data dump of November 2010, reported by several major international news organizations, contributed to the attention. Others proposed that social media platforms played an outsized role in configuring opposition actors. The former missed the point, the latter missed reality. All game-changing uprisings are local.

The government of Tunisia was overthrown in January 2011, street demonstrations became massive a month earlier. Authoritarian ruler Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali was forced to flee along with other government leaders. The events are considered the genesis of the Arab Spring. Over the next year authoritarians in Egypt, Libya and Yemen were also deposed with adjacent countries facing popular revolts or civil war, some continuing.

Tunisia experienced no great birth of independent media after ouster of Mr. Ben Ali or his immediate successors. Newspapers were and continue to be centred on partisan issues; from political personalities and labor organizing to religion. Radio and television remains, largely, state-operated. The internet is widely available and affordable, social media part of that.

In July current Tunisian president Kais Saied dismissed prime minister Hichem Mechichi, suspended the parliament, issues presidential decrees and generally threw the country into a new political crisis. His support from the powerful socially liberal Islamic Ennahda Movement, “inspired” by the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt, is under pressure. Mr. Saied recently named Najla Bouden as prime minister in September, the first woman prime minister in the Arab world, who took office this week. A day after president Saied’s acts of revision the Al-Jazeera bureau in Tunis was raided and shuttered.

Last week Tunisian authorities shuttered television channel Al-Zaytouna, aligned with the Ennahda Movement. Security service officers and staff from media regulator Independent High authority for Audiovisual Communication (Haute Autorité Indépendante de la Communication Audiovisuelle - HAICA) raided the facilities saying it had been operating without a license and removed equipment. Al-Zaytouna had been on the air for a decade, appearing just after Mr. Ben Ali exited for Saudi Arabia. The HAICA was created about the same time after decades of dysfunctional regulation.

Tunisians in the media sector are pessimistic. Al-Zaytouna chief editor Lotfi Al-Tawati called the raid a “political decision” to “punish Zaitouneh for its opposition to the recent exceptional decisions of President Kais Saied,” quoted by Arab Organization for Human Rights (AOHR) (October 7). A week earlier one of the channel’s talkshow hosts - Amer Ayad - was arrested, to face trial by a military tribunal.

A “setback to freedom of expression and a blow to democracy and the right to disagree,” said the National Syndicate of Tunisian Journalists, adding its “absolute rejection of military trials of civilians for their opinions, positions and publications.” The group noted that imprisoning journalists for the work is prohibited under Tunisian law.

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• Hot Topics - Media in the Middle East and North Africa

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