13. Egypt

Egypt’s media landscape is marked by long years of struggle: a paradox, as it is one of the pioneers of media industries in the Arab region, yet today, it has a massively restrained media system. It is also marked by an unresolved identity struggle between its traditional roots in Arab and Islamic culture and the ambivalence towards modernized Westernized lifestyles, as well as highly polarized media–politics parallelism amid controlled conditions that do not allow the media system to fully develop according to its intrinsic professional logics. The recent crackdown on freedom of expression has suspended the potential for professionalization of an autonomous journalism, despite the high potential of the media system.