“It’s very clear to everybody now that there is a conspiracy against Egypt. Why aren’t we taking measures against these people?”

It was Saturday night in Cairo, and dozens of reporters had filed into the Presidential Palace to see Mostafa Hegazy, an advisor to the cabinet, deliver the first major press conference from the interim government since an outbreak of violence that had taken nearly nine hundred lives in the previous three days. The military-backed government, which seized power from the elected President, Mohamed Morsi, of the Muslim Brotherhood, in July, had cleared out a pair of Brotherhood-backed sit-ins in Cairo by force, using bulldozers and firearms. The carnage had been horrifying.

But when it came time for local reporters to ask questions, many of them seemed enthralled by the government’s version of events. One wondered why the government wasn’t taking action against opposition figures who met with officials at the American embassy. (It was this reporter who mentioned a “conspiracy.”) Another asked why the ambassador to Qatar, which supported the Brotherhood and funded its government—or, as the reporter put it, “has been instigating violence in Egypt”—hadn’t been recalled. Another criticized Western media reports that the Egyptian government had backed out of a possible deal with the Brotherhood. “How are you going to deal with that?” he asked.

“Thank you very much for this very important question,” Hegazy replied. In the hours before Hegazy’s appearance, international reporters in Cairo had been e-mailed a statement from the government press office, outlining the ways in which they had failed in their jobs. “Egypt is feeling severe bitterness towards some Western media coverage,” the statement said, adding that the coverage seemed “biased” toward the Brotherhood, and had ignored several countervailing events: the widespread burning of churches, seemingly by Islamists; the attacks on police stations; the supposed use of children as human shields at Brotherhood protests.

Now, Hegazy would reaffirm the point. “Where are all of these stories?” he demanded. It was a question some of the local reporters had as well—and they had some suggestions, too. An Egyptian reporter rose to argue that perhaps if the government showed videos of some of these “missing” stories, the Western media might be compelled to cover them more. “Even people who have a noble cause can undermine it if they don’t present it clearly,” he offered. After the event was over, some international news organizations briefly grounded their reporters in their hotels.

As Egypt circles back toward the authoritarian tendencies of its past, the criticism of the international media is not surprising, but the role that the local press has played as an abettor in this is the more dispiriting phenomenon. In the final years of the Hosni Mubarak era, private television networks and newspapers had opened the door to critical coverage of the regime; their encouragement and reporting helped pave the way for the revolution. There was hope that with a toppled regime might also come a truly independent press, one of the few institutions that could steer the country as it tumbled through a tumultuous post-revolutionary era. But now, when the official state-run television channel puts a banner reading “Egypt Fighting Terrorism” in the corner of its screen (referring, of course, to the Brotherhood), the private networks do so as well. Over the weekend, the privately owned OnTV treated viewers to a highlight reel of the police clearing the Brotherhood sit-in, set gloriously to the soundtrack of “Rocky.” This was the only coverage of the event many of those watching would have seen; local newspapers and television stations give no information about the number of Brotherhood dead, and have never shown images of them. And when reports broke on Wednesday that the former dictator Hosni Mubarak might be imminently released from prison, the local media took hours to mention the news. In the interim, they covered the traffic.

“The media has really changed,” says Lina Attalah, the editor of Mada Masr, an online newspaper that is one of the only truly independent outlets in the country. (So far, it is only in English, but an Arabic version is coming, likely accompanied by a spike in unfriendly attention from the government.) “In the early aughts, with the inauguration of the privately owned stations, we hoped there might also be a new tradition of journalism, one that might to some extent hold authority to account, to monitor human-rights violations, things like that,” Attalah said. “But what’s happening now is we’re seeing that privately owned is not the same as independent. A lot of those companies are not just there to challenge the state; they are instead the property of the businessmen who own them. In the aughts, those businessmen were trying to show the regime that they, too, had power. But now they support the military regime, so it’s not in their interests to be contentious of the military.”

Fatima El-Issawi, a former correspondent for Agence France Presse in Iraq who is now working on a report about the news media in Egypt for the London School of Economics, says one problem that can’t be overlooked is how little the media evolved during the Morsi era. Given the opportunity to remake the press from scratch, most outlets stuck to what they knew, or focussed on more mundane reforms. “The discussions inside the newsrooms were much more about raising the pay of journalists, and not about changing the professionalism of news gathering,” she told me. “It was a very legitimate issue, given how little local journalists are earning, but it took up most of their energy. A review of media practices was simply not a major topic.” It didn’t help that, as Peter Hessler noted in the magazine earlier this year, Morsi removed the entire leadership of the government-run press syndicate and replaced it with a slew of Brotherhood appointees.

What’s happened is a phenomenon that is in some ways more insidious than ordinary censorship: it’s self-censorship, growing out of an instinct for conformity, a self-interest in upholding the dominant narrative, and a desire to see the Brotherhood remain securely out of power. At night, networks host debate panels where the guests disagree only in degree about how horribly the Western media is distorting the story of Egypt, or how much President Obama has abandoned the country by throwing in his lot with the Brotherhood. (The winner on that score was the state-run Channel One, which on Sunday hosted a guest—a former judge for the Supreme Constitutional Court, no less—who alleged that Obama has a half-brother who is a key financier of the Brotherhood.)

In other words, what’s come about isn’t just politically insidious; it’s also bad television.

Photograph: Egyptian Presidency/APA/Corbis.