Egypt’s State Information Services (SIS) announced on Tuesday afternoon that the press accreditation of The Guardian’s Cairo correspondent Ruth Michaelson has been revoked. According to SIS, the correspondent’s accreditation was revoked as a result of her recent article on the number of COVID-19 cases in Egypt which failed to meet ‘journalistic standards’. SIS also issued a warning to New York Times correspondent Declan Walsh who had tweeted figures from a University of Toronto scientific study. The decision by SIS came after 73 Egyptian scientists from around the world wrote a letter to the president of the University of Toronto decrying Dr. Isaac Bogoch, a clinical investigator at Toronto General Hospital Research Institute (TGHRI). According to the signatories, Dr. Bogoch has tweeted false claims that the number of coronavirus cases in Egypt is 19,310. These claims, which come from a study led by Dr. Bogoch, were used in an article by The Guardian and tweeted by NYT’s Walsh. The Guardian’s report stirred debate in Egypt, with a hashtag condemning the British-based paper being among the top used in Egypt on Monday, when the report was published. At the time of publication,…
Egypt Revokes The Guardian Journalist’s Press Credentials Over COVID-19 Reporting
March 17, 2020
