The transformation of Al-Ahram has been almost comically drastic. Every day for years, the newspaper's chairman, Abdel Moneim Said, and its editor in chief, Osama Saraya, wrote editorials that began on the front page of the paper and continued onto Page 3. Saraya was a devout Mubarak loyalist, and Said a "reformer" associated with Hosni Mubarak's Western-oriented son, Gamal. As soon as Mubarak fell from power on Feb. 11, both men became ardent enthusiasts of the revolution. "The people ousted the regime," that day's headline blared. The shamelessness of the switch became a standing joke. Younger journalists at Al-Ahram had shoved Saraya aside long before he was forced out, and this formerly powerful figure is now regarded with ridicule. Even so, says Shukrallah, "they continued to play the game: [They would write,] 'The youth of the street is so wonderful, but now it's time for everyone to go home.'"

Then, on March 30, Prime Minister Essam Sharaf fired Saraya, Said, and the leaders of the other state-run papers and the news agency. On March 31, Al-Ahram appeared with no editorials at all on the front page. This was quite a delicious shock to readers. Hala Mustafa, a longtime democracy advocate who had been banned from the state-run media after quitting a dubious reform body organized by Gamal's supporters, told me, "Now it's just the news -- according to the importance of the news." The front-page news the day I called her consisted of a picture of Mubarak and an article about the effort to put him on trial. The same thing had happened at Rose al-Youssef, another state-run mouthpiece of the ruling party. No more front-page editorials -- just the news, according, more or less, to its importance. Mustafa is writing once again in Al-Ahram.

The change in the broadcast media has been less decisive, and murkier. Several senior figures were fired, and then rehired as consultants. Other prominent Mubarak loyalists remain in place. But some of the most egregious news shows are gone. The show most notorious for pandering to the Mubarak regime, The Heart of Egypt, has been canceled, while on another, Egypt Today, new hosts have replaced the old Gamal booster. More importantly, new late-night talk shows on Egypt's private channels have carried interviews with all the leading figures of Egypt's protest movement; the appearance on one such program of Wael Ghonim, a Google employee who played a key role in organizing the protests and whose arrest in February attracted international attention, was an iconic moment of the revolution. The Muslim Brotherhood is launching its own TV channel on May 1, and the Wafd Party, an element of the traditional -- and traditionally tame -- opposition, plans to follow suit.

There is no denying that much of the news about Egypt in recent weeks has been discouraging. As I write, a huge crowd is gathering in Tahrir Square to demand that the interim military government, known as the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), dissolve Mubarak's National Democratic Party, release political prisoners, and put allegedly corrupt former officials on trial (or so I learn from Al-Masry's excellent English-language website). The military seems equally reluctant to wield power and entrust it to those who fought the regime, instead issuing edicts in the name of the nation without consulting senior (much less junior) civilian figures. The Muslim Brotherhood has been cozying up to the SCAF, provoking fears that military leaders will deliver power to the Islamists. Worried Egyptians are now regularly quoted saying that the revolution has been betrayed.

It still could be, of course. Mass movements elsewhere -- in Ukraine, for example -- have routed dictators only to see new autocrats climb into power. And cheeky newspapers and talk shows may prove to be no match for a deeply entrenched military that has had a taste of political power. But these new tones of voice matter -- or rather, they matter when they become normal public discourse, when people have become accustomed to saying out loud what they have always said in private.

It is very unlikely that the Egyptian people will agree to live again with the lies to which they had become wearily accustomed before, the ludicrous front-page editorials praising elections everyone knew to be bogus. That day is over. Al-Ahram's former chief is memorialized today on the Facebook page "Boycott Al-Ahram till Osama Saraya steps down." The new world of Egyptian media is one of the great proofs that what has happened across the Middle East over the last four months constitutes a transcendent change in world affairs.

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