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Freedom Collection

Interviews with Zied Mhirsi

Interviewed October 3, 2024

I think when you live in Tunisia, you don´t realize how isolated this country is. You live under the impression that we´re on the Mediterranean. Europe is so close. You get, like, 3,000 satellite channels on your TV station. You´re having six million tourists a year coming to the country. You never realize those indicators do not allow you to realize that you live in a country that´s very isolated.

So when I went to the U.S. and I studied there, I contacted the national radio—station [in Tunisia]. And asked them if they can give me 15 minutes so I give them news from the United States. And every Monday night they would call me and I would speak for, like, 20 minutes on the national radio, the governmental TV, giving the news of the U.S. And that program got really popular.

So people would really ask me every week to talk about certain subjects. They would have questions. They would always stay up late at night to listen to that 20 minutes of, like– and those news has pretty much everything. So when I came back to Tunisia people in a private radio station asked me to keep doing that.

So that´s how I got my step in the system to be on a radio. And basically I got a ten-minute show called The Next Big Things. And every time I take a concept that´s very popular in the U.S. and explain it to Tunisian. And say, “This is going to be the next big thing in Tunisia.” And people wanted to have more than that.

So they said, “Why don´t you do another program.” And I was like, “There is something I really want to do, is to talk about social media on air.” Because the concept of social media invading the broadcast and radio and TV space was not in Tunisia yet, although in the U.S. you could see that bloggers were making it on, like, CNN to discuss about issues that were coming up, commenting on other issues.

Others were having radio shows and things like that. So I didn´t really invent this thing. But I was the first one to suggest that idea. And basically they accepted it. Why not talking about social media? I was like, “Facebook is so much fun, let´s talk about it.” And then I used that radio show with my colleague Emna Ben Jemaa. She´s another radio host who was also a blogger, and we went to the same high school together. And we made that show called Netshow the place where all the bloggers would come and discuss about the issues that were really crucial.

And this radio show allowed us basically to use the Internet as an excuse to talk about the issues that were happening in Tunisia. And I guess this was not something that government was happy about. Because we would even interview people who were exiled who were not allowed to speak on air at all. And we´d introduce him, “Hey, a blogger from Holland wrote this and this and said that, you know.” To the random person listening to the show on his radio it does not realize how threatening this was for the show itself or for the person talking.

But I guess the government spotted us. And that was the first international exposure that Tunisia got about the unrest and the protest that were happening. And [Former Tunisian President Zine el Abidine] Ben Ali got advised by his advisors to basically call the radio owner and then have them stop the show. And we got the show censored for like a month throughout the revolution. And then the revolution happened and Ben Ali left. And now the show is still going.