The Media and the Islands Crisis

Abstract Attracting large audiences during the late Mubarak era and the revolutionary period that followed, Egyptian political talk show hosts played an important role in supporting the authoritarian rollback initiated during the summer of 2013 before seemingly losing much of their hard-won influence. To understand their marginalization better, this article claims that the habits and practices these secular preachers acquired, through a relatively autonomous configuration of their field, did not match the post-2013 regime’s media vision. This observation is supported by discourse analysis of the hosts covering the 2016 Islands crisis, highlighting how their discursive strategies, namely the pluralistic ‘in-betweenness’ of most pundits, were rooted in their career trajectories and how they failed to contain the dislocation of the hegemonic discourse, thereby pushing securocrats to strip the media field of its remaining autonomy.