The Media and the Islands Crisis: Understanding the Heteronomization of the Egyptian Media Field through a Comparative Discourse Analysis

Amr Abdelrahim (1)

1 CERI - Centre de recherches internationales (Sciences Po, CNRS)

Drawing large audiences during the late Mubarak era and the revolutionary period that followed it, Egyptian political talk show hosts played a significant role in supporting the authoritarian rollback that was initiated in the summer of 2013, before seemingly losing much of their hard-won influence. To understand their marginalization, this article claims that the habits and practices these secular preachers acquired in a relatively autonomous configuration of their field did not match the post-2013 regime’s vision of the media. This observation is supported by a discourse analysis of hosts´ coverage of the 2016 Islands crisis, which highlights how their discursive strategies, namely the “in-betweenness” of most pundits, were rooted in their career trajectories and how their failure to contain the dislocation of the hegemonic discourse likely pushed securocrats to strip the media field of its remaining autonomy.

Mots clés: Political talk shows; Egyptian media field; hegemony; discourse

Domaines: Science politique

Amr Abdelrahim. The Media and the Islands Crisis: Understanding the Heteronomization of the Egyptian Media Field through a Comparative Discourse Analysis. Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, 2023, 25 p. ⟨10.1163/18739865-tat00009⟩. ⟨hal-04068152⟩