The Egyptian media landscape is less affected by economic preasure in comaprison to the political field precisely because the commercial imperative is less pronounced in a media system in contrast to the power of money through advertising revenue; there are few ratings or audience statistics, and those that are collected are often proprietary and not publicly available.
One has to carve out the space between the patronage of the government and the welfare provision of the publics. Some argue that the oppressive governmental context is gone because the current artificially emptied political stage in Egypt. But this artificially emptied stage has left room elsewhere in that the most powerful people in politics today are businessmen, where journalism and its education has become the most profitable buisness at the expense of the journalism values. With such a long history of censorship and state-control, journalism education challenges have become institutionalized in terms of resources, bureaucracies, and attitudes make the difficulties of a wholesale transformation of the journalism education starkly clear.
This dilemma was further jeopardized with the lack of respect as a result of the state hegemony that manipulated both journalists and journalism programmes as the mouth piece of state-messages and not well-paid. But respect appears to be increasing, at least as reflected in the increasing number of journalism and mass communication departments and programmes as a result of the astronomical demands of students to be enrolled in these departments.
Journalists feel impotent since information is the currency of their profession. Both public and private advertisig buisnesses are not in the habit of sharing information about their experiences of journalism education. As the biggest obstacle to doing improve the field of journalism is not having laws that empower the journalists and assess them based on scientific criteria like research and publishing etc but rather on time for promotion without having quality assurance and encouraging them to attend conferences and work on the teaching skills and assessment.
This is likely an impetus for the perceived prevalence of polemical opinion journalism. Bribery continues to be a problem in some of the private universities.
What it means to “do” journalism is something that journalism attempt to learn after being hired as an editor, reporter, producer, etc. As most of the training occurs on the job, although there are a few training centers in the region, and satellite stations are increasingly able to provide skills institutes for their employees.
It is important to note that the political context in Egypt exerts significantly more pressure on the field than economics or advertising. Furthermore, the processes and practices identified here as a result of the oppressive environment and idle bureaucratic norms.
The economic factor was never the driving force of media ownership, given the industry’s over-saturation and the advertising market’s stunted growth .
However, the professional syndicates in Egypt were very regerious in defending the interests of their members, which created battle fields between rival political forces and professional interests that advoated political freedoms greater than those conceded by the regime. The Press Syndicate, for example, lobbied to restrain the indiscriminate expansion of professional school enrollments, which it said was producing a surplus of under-trained graduates.
Many journalists have been held in jails without trial within the context of this police state. The majority of the human rights violations were related to the armed confrontation between the state police and Islamic militants, and included torture and ill treatment of prisoners and excessive use of force by security forces during rallies or demonstrations, which are banned under the emergency law .
Salaries of journalists are very low and across the ranks, the scale consists of a base, which is the same for all within a rank plus additional increments, the amounts of which vary depending on the number of years of experience and on extra tasks that staff undertake. However, the experience has to do with the number of years, not the academic excellence and expertise!
