News, transparency and the effectiveness of reporting from inside Arab dictatorships

Contradictions in Egyptian media laws, whereby draconian emergency censorship powers coexist with apparently lively media output, seriously affect the content of foreign press reporting from Cairo. Taking account of theories about the way news production norms in free societies marginalize insights into the political structures of societies that are not free, this article examines treatment of struggles that took place in Egypt in 2008 over the licensing of news media and journalists. It finds that, because these struggles involved legal processes not marked by obvious crisis, the full extent of repression they reflected was rarely conveyed in foreign news reports