On January 25, 2011 Egyptians took to the streets demanding the reform, and finally the toppling, of the government of President Husni Mubarak who had been in power since 1981. Throughout eighteen days of demonstrations, protesters chanted “we want a new government, baqina ‘al hadida” a colloquial expression which denotes extreme poverty and disenfranchisement. This paper constrasts the social democratic demands of the Egyptian revolution with outcomes of the post-revolutionary economic policy debates. I argue that the commercialization of the media achieved during Mubarak’s administration was instrumental to influencing public deliberation on economic policy in Egypt, steering ecnomic policy debates to pro-business and pro-investment consensus rather than highlighting the social democratic demands of the revolution. Using a discourse analysis of forty episodes of the popular talk show Al Qahera Al Youm, the paper identifies the common tropes of Egyptian media in addressing economic policy. The show, on air for 12 years during the Mubarak administration, and hosted by the businessman Amr Adeeb, serves as an case study of the impact of growing cross-ownership, commercialization, and corporate power in the Egyptian media. This paper demonstrates that, despite the social justice demands of the street, the Egyptian commercialized media exhibited a systematic bias towards free market capitalism. Further, I argue that commercial television, as well as the introduction of businessmen into the industry introduced a business-minded language into media discourse, allowing neo-liberal ideology to mediate all aspects of the public sphere. The research provides an excellent prism with which to view existing debates on media demoracy and the role of the media as a deliberative space central to the democratization process.