Egypt: Firing Eissa, or Firing Free Press · Global Voices
Tarek Amr

Al-Dostour – one of the leading Egyptian independent newspapers – new owners have fired the paper's editor-in-chief and founder Ibrahim Eissa, sparking a discussion on blogs on the incident as well as Egypt's media scene.
Al-Dustour (also Al-Dostour and Al-Dostor, meaning “The Constitution”) was founded in December 1995. What started as a weekly newspaper published every Wednesday soon turned into both a daily and weekly newspaper. In August 2010, prominent businessman and president of the liberal opposition Al-Wafd party Sayed El-Badawy acquired the newspaper, along with other businessmen, among them the Coptic businessman Reda Edward.
Another Egyptian newspaper, Al-Masry Al-Youm, commented on the deal then saying:
News of Eissa's sacking has been discussed by bloggers in Egypt, who also took the opportunity to analyse what is going on in the Egyptian media scene.
Issandr El Amrani wrote about the firing of  Ibrahim Eissa on his own blog, Arabist. He also commented on the unconfirmed news then that stated that Eissa might have been fired for insisting to publish an Op-Ed written by Egyptian presidential hopeful Mohammed ElBaradie, and the speculations that the new owners of the paper were against publishing it.
Zeinobia then commented on ElBaradie's Op-Ed, and how she believes this is not the real reason for firing Eissa.
Mohamed El-Etr then tried to guess the real reasons behind Eissa's firing.
Thus we can understand the reasons behind Eissa's firing, and how the evidence has proved that El-Badawy is having a deal with the regime.
On a macroscopic level, other similar issues has been taking place in Egypt recently. A few days ago, Eissa himself has suffered from stopping his TV shows, “Baladna Bel Masry” on ON-TV. Zeinobia wrote here how the show might have been stopped after the channel – which is owned by another Egyptian businessman, Naguib Sawiris – received orders from the regime to do so.
Ahmed El-Masry also wrote in his blog a list of incidents that happened recently such as stopping Amr Adib's show, Al-Qahera El Youm (Cairo Today) on Orbit satellite channel, and the fear of the owner of Dream-TV satellite channel that their leading talk-show might get stopped, as well as many other incidents.
Although some of the above incidents might have a non-political background such Amr Adib's show, at least this is what has been claimed, and some others may be just speculations and uncertain news like that of El-Baradie, Alaa El Aswany [Ar], and Ahmed Bahgat, yet no one can deny El-Masry's right to wonder if all these incident have happened by coincidence, and he has all the right to be afraid of the future.
Egyptian bloggers might be pessimistic, as some of incidents stated above – including the firing of Ibrahim Eissa from Al-Dostour – might be really due to non-political reasons, and some of the expectations might not be very certain, yet at the end of the day, the independent and opposing media outlets are falling one after the other. And people are wondering if there are hidden hands playing a certain role in taking those outlets down or not.
Finally, the below status update written by Ahmed Shokeir on his Twitter account should summarize how the bloggers here see what is going on in the media scene now: