ABSTRACT
Television was launched in Egypt in 1960 as part of the strongly nationalist government media policy already established by Gamal Abdel-Nasser during his previous 6 years as president. As one of the Free Officers who overthrew the monarchy in 1952, Nasser acquired powerful radio transmitters in pursuit of a broadcasting project that he believed would consolidate the new regime internally and promote its interests abroad. Plans to expand into television were interrupted by the British-French-Israeli invasion in 1956. They resumed in 1959 with the award of a contract to the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), which involved a US$12.6 million subsidy according to some accounts (Dizard, 1966) but not others (Boyd, 1999). By that time Egypt had gained experience of large-scale radio broadcasting and had been producing feature-length films in abundance for 30 years (Dajani, 1980), so Egyptian television enjoyed an ample supply of locally made entertainment programming. But entertainment was seen as part of a wider mission. Nasser’s agenda for postcolonial political and social change was so all-encompassing that no one in government looked at the country’s broadcasting projects in a commercial light (Abu Lughod, 2005). Indeed, a government ministry took charge of Egyptian broadcasting in the early 1960s and it was called the Ministry of National Guidance (Dabous, 1994).
