The crackdown on the channels, carried out with well-orchestrated speed, was another sign of just how far Egypt’s Islamists had fallen. Having recently been among the most prominent voices on television, they struggled for days to be heard. When Egyptian television stopped covering their protests, the president’s supporters provided live streams on the Internet to show Egyptians their numbers.

Human rights activists condemned the closings and said they thought that the authorities, now under a spotlight, might cave to pressure. Most of the detained journalists have been released, but even so, the crackdown added a martial note to Egypt’s transition, seeming to undermine the military’s assertion that it intended to stay out of politics…

In another echo of the last revolt, the military started accusing foreign news media of spreading “misinformation” and, in at least one case, interfered with their work. During a live broadcast, soldiers stopped a CNN correspondent as he reported on clashes in downtown Cairo, and briefly confiscated a camera. After the BBC and other outlets reported that pro-Morsi protesters had been killed by soldiers outside the Republican Guard club, an unnamed military source told the state newspaper, Al Ahram, that “foreign media outlets” were “inciting sedition between the people and its army.”