From WNYC in New York, this is on the media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

And I'm Bob Garfield. Three years after many protesters died in the process of toppling

Hosni Mubarak's authoritarian regime, there's a tragic sense of deja vu in Egypt.

Egyptian police firing at the crowds, rounding up demonstrators, protesters throwing

stones and fire bombs at the police. Angry scenes similar to the ones Egypt witnessed exactly

three years ago today. The military government is now smothering dissent, whether it comes from

the Muslim Brotherhood,

liberal activists, bloggers, or journalists.

This week, at least a dozen reporters were assaulted or detained while covering clashes

between police and supporters of deposed Egyptian President Muhammad Morsi on the third

anniversary of Mubarak's downfall and state prosecutors charged 20 Al Jazeera reporters

with inventing news that, quote, raises alarms about the state's collapse.

This kept off a week in which Morsi appeared at his own criminal trial, locked in a soundproof glass cage, unable to hear or be heard without the judge pressing a button.

And this, as both state and private media depict the man who deposed him, field marshal Abdul Fatah L. Sisi, as a national hero.

In this landscape, the online newspaper, Mada Mast, is a rare independent voice.

Lena Atollah is editor-in-chief. She described her experience of the current crackdown.

There has been an unprecedented tightening of the political space in general, and this is quite

a development, I say, from the Mubarak time,

because Mubarak had actually left deliberately some margin of freedom

to some relatively, relatively free need depth.

And this was a survival mechanism.

Right now, we're not even finding that margin.

...