At 11 years old, he published his first magazine, Al Haqiqa, which he arranged to print himself and distributed by hand to local schools and newsstands.

When he was 17, during his first year at the Cairo University School of Journalism, Eissa began working for the magazine Rose al-Yūsuf,[1] becoming its youngest editorial secretary.

Although a state-run magazine, it was reputed for its openness to normally taboo topics as well as its leftist and nationalist opposition to the Muslim Brotherhood and the Gamaa Islamiyya.

However, when Eissa refused to support the 1990 Iraqi invasion, he was forced to resign within a year from his political editorship and assume the literary editor position.

[2] A private publisher named Essam Fahmi Ismail approached Eissa's coworker Adel Hammouda about starting a journalistic enterprise of some kind but was rebuffed.

[2] When Dream TV was started in 2001, Eissa was called on to host the current affairs show, Aala Al Qahwa (At the Cafe).

[2] In 2005, he took over Fahmi's other newspaper, Sawt Al-Umma, and made regular appearances on the TV show Min Awul Sadr.

In June 2006, Eissa was convicted of defaming Hosni Mubarak in a piece that described a lawyer's attempt to take the president and his family to court for corruption.

The suit was filed on behalf of Mubarak by a private citizen and proceeded quickly, in contravention of Egyptian judicial norms.

On 31 March 2008, he was found guilty of damaging the national economy after the Central Bank testified that $350 million in investments left Egypt in the days after the article was published.

[6] On 5 October 2010, Ibrahim Eissa was fired from his position at Al-Dustour after the paper was purchased by Sayyid Badawi, a businessman and member of the Egyptian Wafd Party.

[citation needed] The immediate reason was his desire to publish a piece by Mohamed El Baradei who opposed President Mubarak and was a potential presidential candidate.

[9] Earlier in the same year, Eissa was fired from his position as host of Baladna bel Masry, an ONTV political talk show.

[15] Ibrahim Eissa continued working with the channel, serving as a television reporter for the show Fil Midan.

[11] In December 2011, sources indicated that Eissa and other prominent individuals working in various media outlets had received death threats because of the controversial stories they covered.

[3] He also stated in the retrial that Mubarak was a patriotic president who neither ordered the use of force against protesters nor the cutting of phone and internet lines,[20] and only called on security authorities to use necessary measures to contain chaos.