“Every afternoon before I leave the office, I turn off my phone and remove the SIM card. I don’t want to authorities to track my whereabouts.” Ayman (anonymised for protection) is one of Tunisia’s most prominent media profiles, and among the dwindling number of journalists who dare to criticise the authorities. Now he expects to be arrested any day. His boss was arrested and interrogated in February.
This is a far cry from the heady days after the fall of the country’s autocrat, Zinedine Ben Ali (1987-2011), when Tunisia’s media sector was revolutionised along with the rest of society. Like in Egypt, the 2011 Arab Spring resulted in the fall of a severely authoritarian regime. Until the fall of Ben Ali Tunisia was a veritable police state. Then, in a very short amount of time, Tunisians managed to set up new and democratic institutions, including a functioning parliament, an accountable presidency and independent courts.
The revolution also sowed the seeds of new and independent media outlets – radio, television and digital newspapers. The state television and radio company, al-Wataniyya, was redesigned to be a public broadcaster along the lines of BBC. The Journalists’ Syndicate proved to be an efficient protector of journalists’ professional rights vis-à-vis the authorities. Tunisians soon got used to critical news coverage and raucous political debates on prime-time TV. Now, all these gains are threatened and ordinary people do not even seem to mind much. What happened?
