Despite repeated promises earlier to dissolve the Information Ministry (Mubarak’s Ministry of Truth), PM Essam Sharaf re-established the ministry and brought Osama Heikal, editor of Al-Wafd to head it. Heikal had written an editorial on 24 January, one day before the outbreak of the revolution, denouncing the call for protests, asserting that “not a single Egyptian loyal to the nation would wish to see the repetition of the Tunisian scenario in Egypt… and no one wants a confrontation between the people and the regime.”
More troubling, Heikal spent long years as the paper’s “military affairs correspondent.” In Egypt, according to our draconian press law, you cannot write a single word about the army without the approval of the army’s Morale Affairs Department (read: public relations). Those “military affairs” journalists and editors are hardly “journalists and editors” at the end of the day. They are ones who keep close contact with the official establishment of the army and are more than happy to repeat what they say and copy and paste their statements as “news reports.” Heikal is hardly an “opposition” or a “dissident” journalist. He’s someone who spent his career as an army mouthpiece.
It might be worth mentioning too that Osama Heikal’s Al-Wafd party boss, Sayed Badawi, owns Al-Hayat channel, one of the biggest counterrevolutionary media outlets we have in the country, which is sensationally whipping up security paranoia, glorifying the police, and denouncing labor strikes.
