Fergal Mulligan is the Programme Director at National Broadband Plan at the Department of Communications.

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That’s audio from an Egyptian news channel called Extra news, it’s in Arabic of course. That clip is 17 seconds long, and it’s a news item that, in Arabic, contained 42 words. As I understand it, it was broadcast only once on Extra News, the exact same number of times that it was broadcast on all other Egyptian news channels.

And with the exact same text. To the word.
And, every Egyptian newspaper ran the same story, 42 words long, word for word.

The news was about the death of Mohamed
Morsi. Morsi was the first, and so far only, democratically elected president
of Egypt. He won the 2012 elections after the Tahrir Square protests,
part of the Arab
Spring uprising and that swept through the Arab world nearly a decade ago
now.

The Arab Spring was a protest by a mixture
of people, democrats, liberals, economic reformists, and Islamists who were
against the corrupt elites that ruled – and in many cases still rule – the Arab
countries. The Egyptian army, the real controlling force in the country, saw
the way things were going, deposed the longtime dictator, and allowed largely
free elections.

They didn’t go to script. Morsi led the Freedom
and Justice Party, and organization affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood.
The party weren’t Islamic extremists, they confirmed that they were happy for
women and Egypt's minority Christians to serve in government, but they were by
no means what people who wanted Egypt to move towards the western democratic
model would have hoped for, although he seemed to be firmly against corruption.

He lasted a year. The Army, which controls
a huge chunk of the Egyptian economy, with zero oversight, staged a coup,
arrested Morsi, and have imprisoned him ever since, on a whole series of
charges. He was on trial last month for those charges when he died, apparently
of a heart attack.

This is how the Egyptian media announced
his death.