A quick glance at the op-ed page of two of the three daily newspapers in Jordan, Al Ghad and Addustour, will give a hint of how divided Jordanians are over the July 3 military takeover in Egypt and the ouster of President Mohammed Morsi. Almost next to each other one would find columnists giving two opposite views of the coup, the crackdown on Egypt’s Islamists and Jordan’s Muslim Brotherhood. The third daily, the government-controlled Al Rai, has been waging an unrelenting crusade aimed at undermining the Muslim Brotherhood at home and abroad.

Pro-government columnists have been engaged in a daily offensive against the extremist-controlled Brotherhood leadership, accusing it of being anti-democratic, opportunistic, seeking to impose a religious state and being loyal to an international organization.

But with daily editorial attacks on the Muslim Brotherhood, which began almost immediately after the Egyptian military coup, the deliberate campaign has undermined the credibility of the press in the process. Independent columnists have criticized Morsi’s one-year rule and many have called on Jordan’s Muslim Brotherhood movement to learn from the mistakes of their Egyptian counterpart. But none have endorsed an Egypt-like crackdown of the movement, even when Addustour claimed last month that the government was looking into options to rescind the movement’s legal status.

It became clear that the government and the security apparatus, the powerful General Intelligence Dept. (GID), were not on the same page regarding how to deal with the Islamist movement in Jordan. The government spokesman denied Addustour’s report while Prime Minister Abdullah Ensour said he would not change his policy toward the Muslim Brotherhood. But on Saturday, newly appointed Minister of Political Development Khalid Kalaldeh, an opposition activist, announced he would like to open channels of communication with the movement. The call was welcomed by the Brotherhood, but few believed it would end the crisis.