I stumbled into journalism twelve years ago, at the dingy and convivial offices of the Cairo Times, a now defunct independent English language weekly whose Egyptian and foreign interns and journalists have gone on to report across the Middle East. I’ve worked as a reporter in Cairo ever since – as an editor at other local independent publications and as a correspondent for foreign media – and I’ve never known a worse time for journalists in Egypt than the present.
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Now the Brotherhood has been routed; but almost all the public figures who denounced human rights abuses and attacks on freedom of expression under Islamist rule have fallen silent. Some have surely been demoralised by the propaganda, not to mention more practical forms of intimidation and censorship: when the newspaper El Watan ran a front-page story on Sisi’s personal fortune, the issue was stopped at the printer’s.
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Today there are only a few hold-outs: a handful of principled columnists and presenters; the satirist Bassem Youssef, who skewers his fawning colleagues as much as the military authorities; and new online sites, staffed by twentysomethings and unencumbered by investors, that operate on the vulnerable, digital edge of press freedom. Last week, they managed to highlight the plight of thousands of Egyptians who have been arbitrarily arrested, detained without charge and tortured since the summer. One of them was a 19-year-old woman arrested on suspicion of being a Brotherhood protester (she was eight months pregnant and on her way to a doctor’s appointment, she says). A picture of her handcuffed to her hospital bed after giving birth finally led to her release.

When I worked at independent magazines under Mubarak, we faced something close to an advertising boycott. Our publisher occasionally had to field inquiries from state security. An issue with a provocative cover was ‘lost’ at the government-run printing house. But we weren’t too worried about being raided, about being arrested, about people turning on us in the street for being journalists. We feared the state, but even so we felt there were limits to its power and abuses. Now the repression seems unpredictable and boundless; and we fear the citizenry.

- See more at: http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2014/02/22/ursula-lindsey/sisi-and-the-press/#sthash.7iLSTyzF.dpuf