Video of Journalists' Arrest in Egypt Seen as Threat to Media

At NYT:

CAIRO — A leaked video of the arrest of two journalists offered a cinematic close-up on Monday of the new military-backed government’s crackdown on dissent: slow-moving footage of a hotel room full of telecommunications equipment set to the thumping, sinister score of the recent superhero movie “Thor: The Dark World.”

The video, broadcast Sunday night on a private channel that supports the government and circulated widely over the Internet since then, is the latest salvo in a propaganda campaign by the state-run and pro-military news media. The goal is to paint the arrested journalists — known here as “the Marriott Cell,” for the hotel they were arrested in — as part of a terrorist conspiracy. One journalist, an Arabic speaker, is interrogated on camera for several minutes and repeatedly refuses to give up the names of his colleagues.

Both journalists shown in the video are established correspondents who were working for the English language affiliate of Al Jazeera, the Qatari-owned pan-Arab news network. The two, Mohamed Fahmy, an Egyptian-Canadian television producer who previously worked for CNN, and Peter Greste, an Australian correspondent who previously worked for the BBC, have been detained since their arrest on Dec. 29...

Bizarre.

More at that top link.