A general observation, in addition to monitoring report published by competent organizations, including Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies (CIHRS), revealed that the Egyptian mass media, either broadcast, visual or printed media, have repeatedly covered public elections in a manner that usually lacked many of the professional traditions. The media was sometimes biased either for or against specific candidates in accordance with the attitude of the tool used for communication, whether a journal, broadcast station, or TV channel, and whether government controlled, partisan or private, vis-à-vis the party the candidate belongs to or the candidate himself.
This abandonment of the professional tradition includes several forms of practice, including the fact that government-controlled newspapers relentlessly ignore the provision of Article (55) of the Law No 96 of 1966 on the organization of the press, which stipulates that they are independent from the Executive Power and from all political parties, and that they are panels of debate between all political opinions and trends, and active forces within society. Editors of such newspapers drew up their editing policies on the basis that they are mouthpieces of the majority party, which urges them not only to be biased in favor of government candidates, but also sometimes to launch smearing campaigns against their competitors.
Some of the unprofessional practices in this respect are that TV channels and broadcast stations owned by the TV and Broadcast Union; are equally biased in favor of ruling party candidates, sometimes directly and indirectly at others.
During recent years, positive developments occurred in the Egyptian media system, including the launching of several private satellite channels, private newspapers, the expansion of the margin of freedom and autonomy of media coverage of some phenomena. This state of affairs was positively reflected but in a relative manner on media coverage of presidential and parliamentary elections having taken place in 2005. Furthermore, a special law was proclaimed to regulate the presidential elections which included some checks of a professional nature on material that could be either broadcast or published by the media regarding the elections.
However, this does not deny the fact that Egyptian journalists working in newspapers, or audio and visual media, still fall short of professional traditions regarding the coverage of general elections, for reasons relegated partly to the legislative framework governing the electoral process, the legislative framework governing the press itself, as well as the customary practices in this respect which gained the power of law. Moreover, journalists lack accumulated experience on professional traditions governing the coverage of election campaigns, but also some influential media such as TV, broadcast and Internet are almost devoid of any professional code of ethics from the ground up.
Even though the Egyptian press has known the first binding professional ethics regulation in 1946 a few years after the proclamation of the Law on the Establishment of the Journalists’ Syndicate, and since then has experienced five regulations or professional codes of honor, the last of which was proclaimed in 1996 and is still in force to date. However, these codes are characterized by generality and were not developed enough to incorporate thematic codes related to the ethics of publication in different fields of specialization, such as the ethics of publishing news, crimes, dealing with sources of information or informants, advertisements, trials, and last but not least coverage of election campaigns.
If it is inevitable to admit that journalists’ commitment with the ethics of the profession in full requires the removal of legal and customary obstacles hindering freedom of the press. It also requires the elimination of customary and legal situations that allow intervention with the integrity of electoral process. Nevertheless, the presence of these situations is not a pretext for journalists to shirk the commitment with traditions and ethics of their profession, and their elimination is not a pre-condition for such commitment.
In this context comes the attempt to draft a thematic professional code of ethics on the moral values of media coverage of general elections.
This draft is based on relevant provisions in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights, and on the implementation of general professional rules included in the press code of honor regarding elections, as well as provisions of laws regulating the elections and the press, professional traditions in force in democratic countries, and monitoring the mistakes that the Egyptian press fell into while covering general elections.
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