Kassem, who during the twilight of the Mubarak regime did as much as anyone to create pockets of oxygen for hard-hitting journalism, says he is confident that his Egyptian shareholders will return from the sidelines once the country stabilizes politically. Though recent elections turned out an Islamist-dominated parliament, he notes, the process was smooth, setting the stage for a presidential election this year and the end to an unpopular military-led interim government. Venture capitalists are showing renewed interest in his enterprise, the name of which he declines to divulge, and, he said, he’s getting fresh offers for shares.
Even Kassem admits, however, that there is no guarantee Egypt’s national security apparatus, which survived the revolution more or less intact, will go quietly.
During the last few years of Mubarak’s rule, the country’s draconian press laws were loosened so that criticism of the regime was tolerated, if grudgingly and arbitrarily, and independent journals and magazines proliferated. But even that modest flowering was crushed by the ruling military council not long after Mubarak’s removal, according to journalists, with what they suspect is a stealth campaign of harassment.
“The pressure is now worse than ever,” says Ibrahim Eissa, an activist and publisher who last spring launched Tahrir, a newspaper and broadcast company named after the square that served as the locus of the anti-Mubarak movement. “The government passes laws that make it harder to publish. Now, anyone can declare themselves slandered by a story and demand fines. Of course, it’s impossible to say who’s behind these attacks.”
Growth potential
Investor interest in Egypt’s media sector and its enormous growth potential remains high, however. Though less than a fifth of the country’s 85 million people read daily newspapers, that could change if outlets like Kassem’s venture, which will generate print, television, radio and Web-driven content, take root. Internet usage is still relatively low, which means newspapers, radio and television broadcasters will be commercially sustainable for some time. Plus, the country’s state-run press and broadcasters, as unpopular as they are costly to run, are likely to consolidate or disappear altogether, creating new market share for independents.
Buoyed by such projections, Kassem says he will not hesitate to reengage the spooks and functionaries whose job it is to obscure truth from power. In the late 1990s he launched the English-language Cairo Times, a general interest monthly and a must-read for Cairenes outraged at Mubarak’s brutality. Exhausted, he closed shop after several years of prolonged skirmishes with regime censors as the only independent publication of its kind. In 2003 he was recruited to edit Al Masry Al Youm, an independent daily newspaper, and under his watch it evolved into an authentic and profitable dissenting voice.
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