Joshua Hersh details it:
For foreign journalists, who were tolerated under the Brotherhood but have never been viewed with great affection in Cairo, the steep decline in working conditions hit bottom in December, when the police busted down the door of an upscale hotel suite that served as the offices for Al Jazeera’s English-language channel and dragged away the staff. The detained reporters, including the Egyptian-Canadian bureau chief, Mohamed Fahmy, and Peter Greste, an Australian correspondent, were swiftly dubbed “the Marriott terror cell”—a moniker adopted by both the state and private media, which have overwhelmingly supported the military since Morsi’s overthrow. The sweeping litany of charges against the Al Jazeera employees—“disturbing public peace, instilling terror, harming the general interests of the country, possessing broadcast equipment without permit, possessing and disseminating images contrary to the truth”—leave the impression that just about any act of journalism, particularly if it involves speaking to members of the Brotherhood, could be considered a crime.
Dan Murphy fears this could be the beginning of a larger crackdown:
Egypt’s State Information Service (SIS) sent an explanatory note to the foreign press last week that claimed freedom of expression is guaranteed in Egypt, but the note is littered with caveats and get-out clauses. It reads, “Egyptian law ensures (press) freedoms completely and does not penalize for thought and opinion unless this thought turns really to a materialistic behavior that the Egyptian Penal code forbids. And this falls within the crimes that threaten the country’s national security and its benefits.”
Everything that follows “unless” in that sentence means that press freedoms aren’t guaranteed at all. …
The government may be leading the charge against reporters, but the effort for now is a popular one. Minor assaults of reporters, once unthinkable there, have become frequent occurrences when covering protests. Although Al Jazeera is a particular target for the government since the network is owned by Qatar, a supporter of the Brotherhood, that’s no guarantee that spurious charges of “false news” won’t be used to target other reporters.
The Dish 