Biting but bounded: The media reform roadmap on the president’s desk
“Restricted media produces no message, engenders no renaissance, has no influence on citizens, and convinces no one of any achievement. Strong, free media is the nation’s shield defending its existence and expressing its message with intelligence and responsibility.”
So begins the preamble to a report that the Egyptian government would prefer you hadn’t seen yet.
Earlier this year, on Feb. 5, PM Mostafa Madbouly’s office received a sweeping media reform document commissioned by President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi.
In October 2025, the Cabinet had instructed the formation of a committee chaired by Khaled Abdel Aziz, head of the Supreme Council for Media Regulation (SCMR), to undertake this task. A smaller drafting taskforce, chaired by journalist Hamdi Rizk, distilled the committee’s deliberations into a single report to be reviewed by the Cabinet.
The report outlines a thorough roadmap for overhauling Egypt’s media sector. A week after the report arrived at Madbouly’s desk, Minister of Information, Diaa Rashwan announced that it is now awaiting the president’s response. The contents of the report had not yet been made public.
On May 3, World Press Freedom Day, Al Manassa obtained exclusive access to the full text of the document.
The report, along with its annexes—including a draft freedom of information law—lays out an ambitious, yet occasionally contradictory vision: a press that is freer, more professional, more digitally competitive, and more squarely in service of the state.
Whether those goals can coexist is the question the report never quite answers.
Abdel Aziz’s committee comprised 66 members representing nearly every corner of the Egyptian media establishment: the heads of the National Media Authority and the National Press Authority, the leaders of the Journalists’ and Media Professionals’ syndicates, editors-in-chief, academics, private-sector figures, content creators, and digital media personalities.
It also included representatives of United Media Services (UMS), the state’s media arm.
Committee members Khaled Elbalshy, head of the Journalists’ Syndicate, and Essam Kamel, editor-in-chief of Veto, confirmed to Al Manassa that the draft freedom of information law appended to the report is identical to a proposal previously prepared by the syndicate, one of the recommendations of its sixth conference held at the end of 2024.
Media as a state asset
The report opens with a vision of Egyptian media capable of “keeping pace with rapid global transformations” through “professionally trained national media expertise,” with particular emphasis on the sector’s role in “shaping cultural and social awareness and strengthening national identity.” From there, its stated objectives resolve into four interlinked priorities: advancing the national project, elevating public awareness, achieving modernization, and enhancing regional competitiveness.
The committee frames its proposals as a path toward media that “reflects citizens’ concerns and aspirations,” warning that the alternative is “a faltering media system that has lost credibility.” It speaks, too, of “addressing the gaps that, in previous periods, led to the distortion, falsification, or disappearance of public awareness.”
What “awareness” means, however, the report declines to define. No mechanisms for measurement or accountability are offered. The concept is never anchored in the public’s right to access information or in the value of editorial diversity. Instead, the task of building awareness is absorbed into the logic of the “national project” in a framework that seeks to reshape public perception within state-determined boundaries that the report leaves deliberately vague.
“Modernization,” in this context, is not simply a matter of digital upgrades. It is recast as a recalibration of the relationship between media and audience, grounded in what the report calls “respect for the mind” and a commitment to content that “strengthens intellectual immunity against disinformation.” The report later ties what it describes as “hostile” or misleading platforms explicitly to the terrorist-designated Muslim Brotherhood, but the language here remains loose enough to apply far more broadly.
No trust, No freedoms
The report does not pretend that Egyptian media is in good health. It acknowledges a breakdown of mutual confidence between the executive authority, the press, and the public; each viewing the others as incapable of representing their interests. This crisis, the report argues, stems from a mix of professional failures and institutional dysfunction: editorial standards that have collapsed into a largely laudatory and rallying-’round-the-flag style, with leadership deficits, and a workforce hollowed out by inflation and restricted freedoms.
The report names the mechanisms of that restriction directly. It cites control-oriented policies, monopolistic tendencies, and the dominance of a single editorial voice. It acknowledges the continued use of custodial penalties for journalists, the absence of a binding freedom of information law, the weak enforcement of existing protections, and the limited institutional autonomy of media organizations. These are long-standing demands of the Journalists’ Syndicate and the broader journalistic community, and they are framed here, pointedly, as the primary “distortions” crippling the industry.
Yet the report stops short of placing those distortions in their full structural context. A decade of local and international reporting has documented systematic state dominance over Egypt’s media landscape. The report cites its symptoms without fully reckoning with its causes.
It does, however, draw an unexpected connection: these restrictions, the document argues, have undermined the media’s ability to convey the government’s own “success stories.” The implication—that a freer press would serve the state’s interests as well as the public’s—is one of the report’s more candid admissions, even if it frames journalistic independence primarily as an instrument of effective governance rather than a democratic good in itself.
Beyond the political, the report identifies three structural failures that have paralyzed the industry: a bankrupt economic model, a sluggish and fragmented digital transition, and the systemic erosion of human capital. With inflation continuing to hollow out earnings, the document links journalists’ declining creativity directly to a workforce operating under the dual pressures of censorship and poverty; though its proposed concrete remedies leave much to be desired.
The committee’s practical proposals include requiring all outlets to adopt internal editorial codes and accountability frameworks, introducing a unified professional ethics code in coordination with the syndicates, easing regulatory burdens, expanding legal protections for field reporting, and lifting website blocks.
With hundreds of media websites blocked in Egypt since 2017; the report suggests placing future blocking decisions under judicial oversight rather than leaving them to opaque executive enforcement.
An ambitious legislative reform
The legislative recommendations are the report’s most ambitious section and, in some respects, its most surprising.
The committee calls for revisions to Law 180/2018, which governs press and media, seeking what it describes as a “precise balance between safeguarding national security and public order, and protecting press freedoms and the public’s right to know.”
It proposes introducing a dedicated chapter on regulating AI use in media, expanding syndicate representation in elected bodies, and strengthening the separation between editorial and administrative functions at the National Press Authority, alongside exploring the transformation of the National Media Authority into an independent public service broadcaster with stable funding and transparent oversight.
More striking still, the report recommends repealing Article 19 of Law 108/2018; the provision that classifies any social media account with more than 5,000 followers as a media outlet subject to regulation. In its place, the committee calls for replacing the broad, malleable legal terms “threat to national security” and “violation of public morals” with more precise definitions, explicitly intended to limit their use in restricting expression.
On freedom of information, the committee calls for swift enactment of a long-delayed access law and the abolition of custodial penalties for publishing offenses; incorporating, as annexes, draft legislation long championed by the Journalists’ Syndicate.
The syndicate’s proposed access-to-information law is built on a straightforward premise: the public has a right to knowledge, and state institutions are obligated to provide it upon request. Private entities would be subject to disclosure requirements in cases involving individual rights or protection from harm. The proposal establishes a unified framework covering scope, procedures, oversight, and penalties, and creates an independent authority to enforce compliance and adjudicate disputes.
Under the draft, public bodies would be required to maintain open, regularly updated websites and to organize disclosure across three tracks: routine publication of core data at no cost; rapid release within 24 hours of information with direct public impact; and access upon formal request. Each institution would designate an information officer. Journalists and media professionals could submit requests through any channel, including verbally, without using standardized forms.
Response times would be set at seven working days, extendable to 15 days in ordinary circumstances or up to 30 days for complex cases, with judicial recourse also available. Failure to respond to an appeal would be treated as automatic acceptance.
The grounds for withholding information include national security and diplomatic relations, commercial and professional secrets, ongoing contractual negotiations, active criminal investigations, personal data, and information that could harm third-party interests.
While the proposal affirms that disclosure is the default principle—a more progressive stance than earlier drafts—it invokes “national security” without requiring institutions to provide evidence that disclosure would cause concrete harm. That gap leaves considerable room for the very type of broad discretionary withholding that the reform agenda ostensibly seeks to curtail.
Digitization is not digital transformation
Egypt’s media institutions, the report finds, have largely failed to make the leap from analog to digital. Three patterns emerge. The first is outright stagnation: Maspero, the state broadcaster, and several national newspapers have undergone no meaningful transition at all. The second is partial digitization; outlets that have launched digital projects without transforming their workflows or expanding their audiences. The third pattern, the report’s relative success story, is private media, which has largely reinvented itself through its own initiative, but now faces a new reckoning: the integration of AI tools into editorial production.
The near-term recommendations address these gaps incrementally. The committee proposes training programs in AI-assisted content production and disinformation detection, developed through partnerships with independent training bodies and technology companies offering subsidized access. It calls for updated legislation to regulate AI use in media and a standardized institutional guidance framework. It also recommends establishing a fact-checking unit under the SCMR, staffed by experienced journalists and specialists.
What the report does not recommend is equally telling. It makes no proposal to address the low salaries that represent perhaps the most immediate barrier to professional development in the sector.
Over the medium and long term, the committee envisions transforming Egypt’s media into a data-driven, regulated market capable of competing regionally and curbing digital monopolies. The SCMR would establish an independent index to measure viewership and public opinion, replacing the estimates and subjective judgments that currently govern the industry.
Within 36 months, the plan calls for rebuilding a national digital media infrastructure: a cloud-based data center for storage, archiving, and editing; unified digitization of television and radio libraries; conversion of broadcast systems to IPTV protocols; optical character recognition for newspaper archives; and a single national content management system connecting institutions through shared technical infrastructure.
Institutional crisis: A system in decay
Beneath the reform language lies a more immediate problem: Egypt’s state media institutions are, by the report’s own account, in serious decay.
Maspero and the national press are producing weak, repetitive content. Print distribution is collapsing as newsstands and retail outlets disappear. Accumulated debts have reached roughly 9 billion Egyptian pounds, much of it owed in back taxes and social insurance, with some obligations dating to 1961.
To address this, the committee proposes an independent national fund for the propodigital infrastructure transformation, financed through as-yet unspecified means. Maspero’s production system would be centralized into a single integrated newsroom. Regional television and radio stations would be transformed into governorate-focused digital platforms managed from Cairo, supplemented by official podcast channels.
The report also recommends monetizing the fixed assets of national press institutions—particularly the valuable land and real estate holdings of organizations like Al-Ahram and Al-Akhbar—by redeveloping them into schools, universities, and clubs. National newspapers would be restructured into full-service “media companies” with integrated newsrooms, production studios, and commercially driven operating models.
That ambition, however, has a conspicuous blind spot. The report’s near-exclusive focus on rehabilitating state institutions comes at the direct expense of Egypt’s independent and smaller outlets, which continue to face the procedural, legal, professional, and security obstacles that the committee itself identified and documented, but did not meaningfully propose to resolve.
The gap between diagnosis and prescription is, in the end, the report’s defining characteristic. It names Egypt's media crisis with unusual candor. It locates the causes with reasonable accuracy. And then, at each critical juncture, it pulls back from the conclusions its own evidence demands, and instead substituting the logic of state interest for the harder work of genuine reform.
Whether the cabinet will act on even these qualified proposals remains to be seen.