The reign of Muhammad Morsi, the first elected Egyptian president after the 2011 uprising, lasted only one year (from June 2012 to June 2013), at the end of which he was overthrown in a soft coup. The academic research on the causes of Morsi’s ouster points to mismanagement, a lack of knowledge and experience, the absence of a qualified cadre to fill positions in the administration of the state, and an outdated platform, alongside the lack of legitimacy on the part of the old political elites, including the army, the non-Islamist opposition, and the judiciary. In my talk, I will argue that the state-run press, which used to serve as the mouthpiece of the regime since its nationalization in the 1960s, delegitimized Morsi and his policies, contrary to the pattern of the relationship between the official media and the regime in the past. Based on quantitative and qualitative analysis of about 4000 opinion columns of the Egyptian daily al-Ahram, which is known for its loyalty to the ruler, I will depict the unorthodox behavior of this journalistic institution and show that not only did it not support the rule of the Muslim Brotherhood, but that it even played an adversarial role. While the prevailing scholarly assertion is that following the 2011 uprising, state-run media continued to adhere to the one-sidedly favorable attitude toward the regime, including under Morsi, I will argue that al-Ahram’s op-ed columnists substantially shifted to a critical commentary on Morsi’s policies and advanced an oppositional political agenda, while delegitimizing the agenda of the Muslim Brotherhood and remaining loyal to the civil non-Islamist elite, which was privileged under Mubarak. Only a small group of columnists, including the editor-in-chief, consistently served as Morsi’s trustees and constantly backed his regime. These findings refute a common assumption in the literature concerning the "Brotherhoodization of the media" (akhwanat al-Iʿlām) during Morsi’s tenure, meaning the Muslim Brotherhood’s takeover of the media, either by replacing the veteran newspaper editors with Morsi’s loyalists or prosecuting hundreds of journalists who criticized him. Alternately, the results support the claim that the media served as a “deep state” element within the polarized atmosphere of post-revolutionary Egyptian politics, only partly controlled by the “visible state”.