Veteran broadcasters remember when the "cough key" in radio studios was called "censor key" in the first half of the last century. At the time, a senior military censor would sit in the studio while the presenter reads news with his hand on the button to press it and cut the presenter from live transmission if any news item was seen to jeopardise the safety of the national troops. That was mainly in the big broadcasting houses of European empires, which had troops in Asia, Africa and Latin America. The censor disappeared, and censorship abolished but the button remained to be used by radio announcers to cut the microphone to cough or sneeze without going on air - that is why it is now called "cough key".
What reminded me of this was the proposed draft law to create a regulatory body in Egypt to "control" broadcasting and mass communication. Though the leaked proposal is still a draft, one can expect it easily to become a law once put to the parliament, with a sweeping majority from the ruling party.
Media and communications are regulated by bodies or authorities in many developed countries that abolished "state information" ministries. But in Western democracies, and developing countries in transition, such bodies are true to their names: regulators to oversee the market rules are fairly applied among competitors, while the proposed body in Egypt is just an aggregation of all old rules and obstacles in a new body. Moreover, according to the draft law that body is going to be more of a monitor and censor than a regulator.
Allocation
Regulating the allocation of transmission frequencies and processing new application for media and communication provider is already handled by existing bureaucracies. If the Egyptian government wants to restructure its state-media and shed the burden of tens of thousands of people working in its radio and television sector, a regulatory body of the communication ministry, or that of the state information agency is enough to shoulder the required function. Reform contradicts increasing bureaucratic hurdles, and it is odd to restructure to complicate rather than to facilitate.
Heart of the matter is not regulation; it is supposedly intended strangulation of nascent free media. Actually, the draft law is to cover not only radio and television, but the internet - particularly social networking sites - and mobile phones and any other means of communication to come! Using vague items like "protecting values, social security, economic and political stability," the law entitles the proposed body to punish media people in fines and imprisonment.
Since young Egyptian web-surfers used Facebook and other sites to buildup support for protest marches in April, the government has come down heavily on the media - that truly had gained a significant window of freedom in recent years. The draft law is just a step culminating other steps taken since then; more prominent of it is the trial of Nader Gohar. He is the head of Cairo News Company (CNC), a service provider for television channels working from Egypt. The state thinks that his company was the one that fed photos from demonstrations in Mahalla, north of Cairo, in April where some protesters tore a poster of the president.
The draft law is a more media-muzzling version of the proposal to have an Arab Media Charter through the Arab league. Some countries were reluctant to adopt the document. It seems that as the pan-Arab proposal faltered, it was left to each country to set its own rules.
Egypt has traditionally been a media pioneer in the region, before it lost its position to new media spots - first in Lebanon then in Doha and Dubai. Definitely it is not thinking of reclaiming its leading role by such moves.
Debate
Publishing the draft law has stirred a hot debate, with many independent media and political activists criticising it as being more oppressive than the current legislations. Some argue that there must be rules to protect "society cohesion" from the dissemination of dangerous views. Unfortunately, experience tells us that this argument is always a false pretext: such rules are mainly to protect the interests of a very small section of the elite at the expense of the right of the majority to get free information and opinion.
Dr Ahmad Mustafa is a London-based Arab writer.
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