Framing April 6: Discursive dominance in the Egyptian print media

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Much attention has been given to the role of electronic media in organizing recent protests in Egypt, particularly the ability of a group known as the “April 6 Youth Movement” to attract 70,000 members to a Facebook group in support of a general strike planned for April 6, 2008. Print media, however, have been relatively understudied despite their importance as a shaper and reflection of elite opinion and their role in influencing public perceptions of the protests. There was a dramatic discrepancy among Egyptian papers in how the strikes were described, and so a comparison of how Egypt’s official and independent newspapers framed the 2008 protests makes a fascinating case study in how social movements and their opponents seek to present advantageous versions of events. How this effect occurs is relevant to the study of both social protest movements and the ways in which authoritarian regimes deal with opposition. Some may challenge the importance or influence of print media in Egypt; roughly half of the population of Egypt is illiterate and it is generally only elites who are the primary consumers of print media. While I am hesitant to overstate the influence of newspapers, to discount the message that print carries entirely is short-sighted. It can be argued that the goal of the competition over framing is precisely to influence those very elites who, after all, are generally those wielding political power. While this study examines newspapers published immediately after the April 6 strikes, the argument presented here should be generalizable to other forms of media such as television, or to any other medium in which we find a competition to establish an accepted interpretation of events – the dominant frame.