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While in the case of the Arab Spring the focus of research and debate was very much on the role of social media in enabling political change both during the uprisings and in their immediate aftermath, the impact of traditional national mass media and journalism on framing this political change has been less addressed. In this article, we investigate the role of Egyptian journalists in shaping Egypt's complex and fast-moving political transition. Based on a thematic analysis of in-depth interviews and a conceptual framework building on Christians et al.'s normative roles of the media, it can be concluded that the monitorial and facilitative roles, which were prevalent in the early stages of the post-Mubarak era, were quickly overturned in favor of a radical and collaborative role. Egyptian journalists working in private media thus demonized their political adversaries, mainly the Islamists, transforming this political 'other' into the ultimate enemy. At the same time, the new military regime was being revered and celebrated. This arguably contributed to further destabilize the fragile transition to democracy. It is furthermore concluded that for democracy to succeed in an Egyptian context, antagonistic political conflicts need to be transformed into agonistic ones both at the level of political culture and media culture.

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The Egyptian media displayed a high level of content diversity in the final years of the Mubarak regime, prior to the 2011 uprising. This diversity expanded considerably after the uprising when national media embodied expressions of dissent with unprecedented openness, in defiance of the entrenched identity of the journalist as the regime’s guard. This article investigates the dynamics of journalistic agency in Egyptian newsrooms in search for a new identity, investigating the challenges, hopes and trade-offs of a painful process of change. It looks at the complex interplay between these agentic dynamics and inherited structures within an uncertain and highly contested transition to democracy, which finally collapsed into a new chapter of authoritarianism. The article argues that while journalistic agency helped support trends towards democratization in media and politics in the immediate aftermath of the uprising, it also acted as powerful platform in ‘othering’ opponents preparing the ground for the return of autocratic practices and ultimately the fall of the democratic experiment.

The blood of Egyptian Copts on the streets of central Cairo on 9 October 2011 could be accurately described as the first major setback for the Arab Spring. Preserving the rights of minorities as full citizens in the face of longstanding persecution and neglect is a pressing challenge for the Arab revolutions. However, the dilemma of the rights of Christian minorities within the Arab world is a historical one, deeply rooted in a complex interplay of social, economic and political factors predating the Arab Spring and its unpredicted implications. The growing signs of a radical Islam empowered by the loosening grip of Arab dictatorships raise concerns that go beyond the question of security and political representation for minorities. There is a bitter race between, on the one hand, secular forces weakened both by the absence of any previous organisational cadres and by the misuse of secularism by nationalist Arab regimes and, on the other, religious forces that are pushing forcefully for further overlap between religion and the state. As the results of the first free elections in Tunisia demonstrate the popularity of Islamism in the midst of entrenched secular countries, it is clear that the battle between the two trends is an unequal one.