Controlling the news flow has been the aim of repressive governments in many parts of the world. The former Soviet Union installed radio transmitters to scramble incoming western radio programmes and prevent it's citizens accessing free world news broadcasts. In particular, this blocking action was aimed at both the BBC World Service and Voice of America.
Eventually, satellites overcame the sheer logistics of blocked signals and in today's world the task of excluding news has got harder. China remains a last bastion of attempts to control what it's citizens see and hear - and even social media is censored. Attempts to access historical events in Tienanmen Square fifty years ago are swiftly blocked by the " media police ".
The world is shocked by a prison sentence handed down to three Al Jazeera journalists by an Egyptian court this week. Award winning Australian journalist Peter Greste and two of his companions, Mohamed Fahmy and Baher Mohamed were sentenced to seven and ten year periods of incarceration. They were found guilty of assisting the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood and broadcasting false information.
Egypt is undergoing vast domestic change. An uprising removed a dictator and a following election installed Mohamed Morsi as the new president. Unfortunately, he tried to turn the country into a hardline Islamic state against the wishes of many of his subjects and this led to a coup which saw him replaced by Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi, the former commander of the Egyptian army.
The Middle East is the scene of conflict between the Sunni and Sh'ite followers of Islam and the Al Jazeera television network is located in Qatar, which is opposed to the El-Sisi regime in Cairo. It seems that the prison term imposed on the Al Jazeera journalists is simply a pay-back against that channel - and a warning to other news organizations that a similar fate awaits them unless they are discreet in the way they report events.
This new Egyptian government made a bad miscalculation when they allows the trial to be held in open court. The transparency of the evidence was clear to all. Endless delays in the proceedings and the fact that the prosecution made no attempt to present anything bearing even a shred of fact made the entire trial nothing but a bad joke. When the chief judge handed down a " guilty " verdict and imposed a harsh sentence the intention of the government to use a " show trial " to gain it's ends was exposed.
Now Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi has painted himself into a corner. He has stated that he will not interfere in the court process and hand out a Presidential pardon, but this trashing of justice is not going to go away. The world news scene has taken up it's cause and this will be relentlessly pursued by the full rescources of the richly endowed Qatar government. When a government imprisons journalists for doing their job it affronts the world wide media - and they will be relentless in keeping this issue at the forefront.
The last thing Egypt needs is this " unfair trial " burr under it's saddlecloth as the new president tries to settle things down and gain legitimacy for his imposed regime. It sounds as if the military are tending to install a strict regime of control over all aspects of civilian life - and take a heavy hand to controlling what Egyptians see and hear on their television screens.
Those days are long gone - as even the Chinese are finding. The electronic age has opened the world of communications and those who take the suppression road - do so at their peril. The sooner the new Egyptian president realises that using the courts as a weapon was a bad mistake - and takes action to free the imprisoned journalists - the sooner his regime will have a hope of settling peacefully into place.
The solutions that were common in solving problems last century - no longer work today !
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