One day in October, a cluster of mask-wearing, poster-waving protesters gathered in front of the white-domed Tunisian parliament building to object to a decree that could have normalised political interference in the media. Mahdi Jlassi, the president of the journalists’ union, criticised the bill, claiming that the lack of transparency about who financed the Tunisian media was a threat to the security of the country as well as to freedom of expression. “We are not going to accept chaos,” he told me.
“And so? What about Fox and Murdoch?” retorted Said Ferjani, an MP whose Islamist party, Ennahda, is dominant in parliament and was supporting the bill. But under that pressure, the decree was in due course withdrawn.