AROUND mid-September an Egyptian blogger embarrassed his country’s leading state-run newspaper by revealing that it had doctored a photo of president Hosni Mubarak. Apparently keen to emphasize that Mr Mubarak remains a respected statesman after nearly three decades of rule, the image showed him striding ahead of four other leaders at a White House peace summit hosted by Barak Obama. In fact, he had trailed a few steps behind.
It was not the first time Egyptians have noticed clumsy visual tricks in government-owned media. The same newspaper, Al-Ahram, has for many years illustrated stories about the 82-year-old president with dated portraits that show him as a much younger man. This time, Al-Ahram’s editor blithely explained that the altered image was meant to be “expressionistic” rather than factual.
In the past Al-Ahram’s editors would likely not have bothered to acknowledge any fault, and in fact, ordinary Egyptians would have feared exposing any such trickery in public, as would citizens of most other Arab countries today. But things have changed in Egypt. Not only was the original blog posting widely reported in the country’s increasingly daring independent press. It went viral in electronic media, inspiring a barrage of satire.
Twitter and text messages boasted that Mr Mubarak had been the first man on the moon, or that he had discovered America. A Facebook page sprouted, purporting to be an outlet for the “Al Ahram Graphic Expressionist School” and featuring varied photoshopped versions of the same White House scene. In one, Jordan’s King Abdullah, the shortest man at the meeting, appears taller than the rest. Others show the leaders led by a belly dancer, as if in an Egyptian wedding procession, or by a beach-goer sporting flip-flops and a towel.