By Nihal El Aasar
The counterrevolutionary process that unfolded with the popular military coup of 2013 of Egypt which saw Abdelfattah el-Sisi become president and the Egyptian military seize full institutional control, has not only resulted in worse repression than pre-2011 Egypt, but has also shifted many tectonic plates around the country resulting in tidal waves, the consequences of which have not been fully digested yet.
Maher Hamoud’s intervention with this book is to bridge the gap in this literature by using Critical Political Economy (CPE) to analyze the landscape of the Egyptian media market by examining several prongs that make up the particularities of the ecosystem of Egyptian media; mainly advertising, social media, news coverage and TV through four different chapters. In each chapter, he effectively manages to demystify these specific elements of the media under Sisi’s regime.
Through a mixed-methods approach, combining qualitative historical and contemporary research with interviews to get over the hurdle of the paucity of empirical research available, he manages to unveil and trace the critical ownership structures of Egyptian media. Hamoud also grounds the reader by providing a sweeping overview of the political economy of Egypt from when it became a republic in 1952, until the present day, deftly going through the most important historic instances in the country’s media and cultural history that have not been given sufficient scholarly attention.
The strength of Hamoud’s book is that despite the topic of the book focusing on the media, the book uses media as a lens through which to tell the story of post-2013 Egypt, and give a glimpse into how the military was able to permeate and take over various Egyptian institutions, until it was able to cement its power.
The reader need not have previous familiarity with Egyptian media, or have a specific focus on media to be able to engage with this book. Rather, it stands as an important historical document of the past ten years of Egyptian political and cultural history. It also serves as one of the first texts that take seriously the matter of media making post-2011, deconstructing the military’s takeover of the media, both linking it and differentiating it from pre-2011 iterations. In that way, it serves as an essential text for informing media research in Egypt.
In illuminating how the military through state intelligence was able to acquire total control over the media apparatus in Egypt in a way that is unprecedented in Egyptian history, Hamoud illuminates the contradiction that Sisi’s regime has to grapple with. In constantly seeking to expand the ways through which it can securitize and control every aspect of society, it has to sacrifice full profit- making potential, something which it so desperately seeks, yet is unwilling to cede any control in fear that it might suffer the same fate as Mubarak’s regime.
This article is published by Cultural Studies Journal