In November 2022, Democracy Now! went to Egypt to cover the U.N. climate summit in Sharm el-Sheikh amid mounting international pressure for Egypt to release British Egyptian political prisoner Alaa Abd El-Fattah, who began a complete food and water when the summit began. After the summit, we went to Cairo and visited the offices of Mada Masr, the most important independent media outlet in Egypt, and where Alaa published many of his pieces. Amy Goodman interviews Mada Masr founding editor Lina Attalah about how the project was started in 2013, and much more. “The country was heading towards a major political transformation, as marked by the coup, the takeover of a military government and the ouster of the Muslim Brotherhood government,” recalls Attalah. “We had a very strong intuition that it’s going to be a hard time, not just for us as journalists but for the Egyptians by and large, specifically anyone who’s engaged in politics and civic action. And we thought that it was important to create a locally conceived record of this moment by starting this media.”

This post was originally published on Democracy Now! Audio.