News today is a new Arab TV network is to be launched early next year. The imaginatively named "Al-Arab" is to be a rival of Al-Jazeera. It is to focus on the 'important shifts taking place across the Arab world, with an emphasis on freedom of speech and freedom of press'. It is the brain child of a Saudi prince, Alwaleed Bin Talal. And it is to be based in Bahrain.
The entire idea is laughable at first sight. That a Saudi prince would want to promote the Arab Awakening, when his family has opened its arms to exiled heads of states. That he would base himself in Bahrain, where his country's military repressed the Bahraini movement and helped temporarily crush the free press - there is a reason a Bahraini journalist was singled out for an International Press Freedom award by the Committee to Protect Journalists, an award given to those who have put their lives on the line to stand up to oppression. Such a network cannot exist in his home country, where free speech is non-existent. A Saudi Arabian base for Al-Arab is an impossibility; a Bahraini one is ironic.
It all sounds too ridiculous to believe. Compound this with the fact that the same man has only in the last week bought a $300m stake in Twitter, one of the most important social networks to the revolutions, and you have to wonder what Bin Talal is up to.
Is he really lining himself up as a patron of political and press freedom? Or is he excercising his power as one of the richest men in the world to protect his family from the very same things? Perhaps we'll find out next month, when Al-Arab launches.
Showing posts with label journalism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label journalism. Show all posts
Wednesday, 28 December 2011
Late Night Musing
Over the holidays I've picked up Robert Fisk's The Great War For Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East again. Part history, part autobiography, it took me a while to invest fully in this 1000 page epic - I bought it over a year ago, in fact - but I'm now finding it to be the most engrossing non-fiction I've read in a while, which is why I'm writing this at three in the morning.
At the point I'm at in the book, Fisk has been covering the the Iran-Iraq war for eight years, and one event's coverage has been self-apologetically skewed by the world's media. In 1988, an American warship shot down a commercial airbus travelling from Bandar Abbas in Iran to Dubai, killing all 290 passengers and crew. Amongst the dead was a wedding party, all in their dresses and suits. One young mother died cradling her year-old son. The west's immediate response was justification - that there were terrorists on board, that it was making a suicidal dive for a US warship, that it was an 'understandable' mistake, and so on. When Fisk's own investigative report showed the blame lay almost entirely on the US, that it was a loss of life that never needed to happen, his report was heavily censored to remove the anti-western slant. This led to his resigning from The Times and going over to The Independent.
I'm writing this because in one paragraph Fisk sums up the importance of a free press and its responsibility and duty in disseminating information (emphasis mine):
The examples are not as striking as Fisk's, but the spirit of them is the same. When news is clouded by political agendas and biases, the news also begins to carry those biases, which affect our perception of events. Then again, it's also difficult not to be entangled by political biases. I suppose a journalist can only strive to report events as they, and avoid impressing what they want those events to mean.
Perhaps it's because it's that hour of night when everything seems thought-provoking, but I felt like sharing that.
At the point I'm at in the book, Fisk has been covering the the Iran-Iraq war for eight years, and one event's coverage has been self-apologetically skewed by the world's media. In 1988, an American warship shot down a commercial airbus travelling from Bandar Abbas in Iran to Dubai, killing all 290 passengers and crew. Amongst the dead was a wedding party, all in their dresses and suits. One young mother died cradling her year-old son. The west's immediate response was justification - that there were terrorists on board, that it was making a suicidal dive for a US warship, that it was an 'understandable' mistake, and so on. When Fisk's own investigative report showed the blame lay almost entirely on the US, that it was a loss of life that never needed to happen, his report was heavily censored to remove the anti-western slant. This led to his resigning from The Times and going over to The Independent.
I'm writing this because in one paragraph Fisk sums up the importance of a free press and its responsibility and duty in disseminating information (emphasis mine):
It's easy for a journalist to become self-important about his work, to claim that he or she is the bearer of the truth, that editors must stand aside so that the bright light of a reporter's genius may bathe the paper's readers. It's also tempting to allow one's own journalistic arguments to take precedence over the ghastly tragedies which we are supposed to be reporting. We have to have a sense of proportion, some perspective in our work. What am I doing - what is Fisk doing, I can hear a hostile reviewer of this book ask - writing about the violent death of 290 innocent human beings and then taking up five pages to explain his petty rows with The Times? The answer is simple. When we journalists fail to get across the reality of events to our readers, we have not only failed in our job; we have also become a party to the bloody events that we are supposed to be reporting. If we cannot tell the truth about the shooting down of a civilian airliner - because this will harm 'our' side in a war or because it will cast one of our 'hate' countries in the role of a victim or because it might upset the owner of our newspaper - then we contribute to the very prejudices that provoke wars in the first place. If we cannot blow the whistle on a navy that shoots civilians out of the sky, then we make future killings of the same kind as 'understandable' as Mrs Thatcher found this one. Delete the Americans' panic and incompetence- all of which would be revealed in the months to come - and pretend an innocent pilot is a suicidal maniac, and it's only a matter of time before we blow another airliner out of the sky. Journalism can be lethal.It's easy, especially so in the coverage of a war, to fall into a black-and-white view of things. If we are invested in it ourselves, we naturally want to portray 'our side' as in some way better. This may have been written about an event twenty three years ago, but it resonates with the coverage of stories today. The abuses carried out by Libyan revolutionaries against black 'mercenaries', many of whom were only in Libya to make a legal living, was underplayed compared to the wreckages left in the wake of Gadaffi's army. Our media whole-heartedly supported the burgeoning democratic movements in North Africa until Islamist parties came to the fore, at which point it became a much more sensitive subject.
The examples are not as striking as Fisk's, but the spirit of them is the same. When news is clouded by political agendas and biases, the news also begins to carry those biases, which affect our perception of events. Then again, it's also difficult not to be entangled by political biases. I suppose a journalist can only strive to report events as they, and avoid impressing what they want those events to mean.
Perhaps it's because it's that hour of night when everything seems thought-provoking, but I felt like sharing that.
Monday, 2 May 2011
William Cobbett
Some background information on Cobbett:
When reading Rural Rides, it doesn't immediately come across as a journalistic work. Cobbett's writing style is to write his thoughts down as they come, with little to no revision. His advice was to “Use the first words that occur to you, and never attempt to alter a thought; for that which has come of itself into your mind is likely to pass into that of another more readily and with more effect than anything which you can, by reflection, invent.” His writing style is similar to the stream of consciousness narrative mode, and he does tend to ramble. For example, in one chapter he writes at length about William Ewing, a famous shooter from Philadelphia he once went out hunting pheasants with during his exile in America. The anecdote, while entertaining, has little to no bearing on anything to do with his journey. By the end of this tale, Cobbett puts more focus on the hunting hound he had taken during that trip than the character of William Ewing, which then trails into a discussion on how there are different sorts of men just as there are different breeds of dogs. It leaves you to ask, sometimes: What is Cobbett's point? Sometimes he doesn't seem to have any, and in the previous example I don't think there was a point to his story until near the end when he began writing nostalgically of his favourite hunting hound.
Having said that, there is also a wealth of social commentary in Cobbett's work. One exchange he has with his son after visiting the Winchester cathedral sums his views up:
As Cobbett goes around the countryside, he judges the living standards of the labourers in many of his stops. Early in the book, in Cirencester, he judges that 'the labourers seem miserably poor. Their dwellings are little better than pig-beds, and their looks indicate their their food is not nearly equal to that of a pig'.
Something that comes across quite clearly is Cobbett's compassion for these people, even despite his better upbringing. In the chapter Winchester to Burghclere, he details how he was resolved not to breakfast in Winchester, and from this decision does not get the chance to eat until the afternoon, when he buys bread and cheese from a labourer. He has a lucid moment of compassion before eating it; he describes how he irritably snaps at his son over a trivial matter. Realising his irritability was from his hunger, and that he was made this way from missing just a single meal, he begins to understand how miserable the lives of these labourers must be, and how they cannot be blamed if they turn to thievery to support themselves.
At one village, he likens the labourers on farms to slaves, which he saw in America. From his view, the slaves lived a better life than the labourers. He points out the flaw of logic in the press and by politicians, who say that education will righten the working class's morals and prevent thievery, but you only have to look to their half-starved selves to see that the working class is corrupted by their lack of food or drink. He exhibits even more disgust at the fact that felons in prison are allows better food, clothing and housing than these labourers.
I don't know if Rural Rides stands up as a great example of journalism. It meanders too much, and too often has no precise 'point' to it. Cobbett's thoughts are completely unfiltered here. While it provides an insight into the rural life in the period it was written in, I'm unsure if it could be called journalism in its purest sense – Cobbett is as much a story teller as he is a reporter, perhaps more so.
- He was born in 1763 in Farnham, Surrey, not too far from Winchester. He died in 1835 at the age of 72. The tavern he grew up in is now called the William Cobbett after him.
- He spent many years outside of the UK, in France and later America. In America, he started his career as a journalist publishing a pro-British pamphlet. This was in the last years of the 1700s, approximately twenty years after the American revolution.
- When he finally returned to England in the early 1800s, he established his newspaper, the Weekly Political Register, which at its greatest had a circulation of 40,000 copies. He became a radical, calling for the need for parliamentary reform.
- In the early 1800s, the agriculture industry was frequently depressed and the poverty in rural areas great. Unsatisfied with what Parliament was doing to fix these issues, Cobbett took it upon himself in the early 1820s to travel around the countryside of England and view the lives of rural people himself.
When reading Rural Rides, it doesn't immediately come across as a journalistic work. Cobbett's writing style is to write his thoughts down as they come, with little to no revision. His advice was to “Use the first words that occur to you, and never attempt to alter a thought; for that which has come of itself into your mind is likely to pass into that of another more readily and with more effect than anything which you can, by reflection, invent.” His writing style is similar to the stream of consciousness narrative mode, and he does tend to ramble. For example, in one chapter he writes at length about William Ewing, a famous shooter from Philadelphia he once went out hunting pheasants with during his exile in America. The anecdote, while entertaining, has little to no bearing on anything to do with his journey. By the end of this tale, Cobbett puts more focus on the hunting hound he had taken during that trip than the character of William Ewing, which then trails into a discussion on how there are different sorts of men just as there are different breeds of dogs. It leaves you to ask, sometimes: What is Cobbett's point? Sometimes he doesn't seem to have any, and in the previous example I don't think there was a point to his story until near the end when he began writing nostalgically of his favourite hunting hound.
Having said that, there is also a wealth of social commentary in Cobbett's work. One exchange he has with his son after visiting the Winchester cathedral sums his views up:
After we came out of the cathedral, Richard said, “Why, papa, nobody can build such places now, can they?” “No my dear,” said I. “That building was made when there were no poor wretches in England called paupers; when there were no poor-rates; when every labouring man was clothed in good woollen cloth; and when all had plenty of meat and bread and beer.”Ignoring the belief that life a millennium ago was superior to contemporary life, which I think seems over-simplified, Cobbett here is expressing his dissatisfaction with the lifestyle of common labourers. Life is meagre for them, and steps must be taken to improve it. One can't help but be reminded of Marx's idea of the proletariat’s liberation from the bourgeoisie, but Cobbett focuses on a different class of people. Marx looked down on labourers and did not even consider them in his Manifesto, but the labourers cause is one of Cobbett's obsessions. He also takes up the cause of the Catholics, though he is not Catholic himself.
As Cobbett goes around the countryside, he judges the living standards of the labourers in many of his stops. Early in the book, in Cirencester, he judges that 'the labourers seem miserably poor. Their dwellings are little better than pig-beds, and their looks indicate their their food is not nearly equal to that of a pig'.
Something that comes across quite clearly is Cobbett's compassion for these people, even despite his better upbringing. In the chapter Winchester to Burghclere, he details how he was resolved not to breakfast in Winchester, and from this decision does not get the chance to eat until the afternoon, when he buys bread and cheese from a labourer. He has a lucid moment of compassion before eating it; he describes how he irritably snaps at his son over a trivial matter. Realising his irritability was from his hunger, and that he was made this way from missing just a single meal, he begins to understand how miserable the lives of these labourers must be, and how they cannot be blamed if they turn to thievery to support themselves.
At one village, he likens the labourers on farms to slaves, which he saw in America. From his view, the slaves lived a better life than the labourers. He points out the flaw of logic in the press and by politicians, who say that education will righten the working class's morals and prevent thievery, but you only have to look to their half-starved selves to see that the working class is corrupted by their lack of food or drink. He exhibits even more disgust at the fact that felons in prison are allows better food, clothing and housing than these labourers.
I don't know if Rural Rides stands up as a great example of journalism. It meanders too much, and too often has no precise 'point' to it. Cobbett's thoughts are completely unfiltered here. While it provides an insight into the rural life in the period it was written in, I'm unsure if it could be called journalism in its purest sense – Cobbett is as much a story teller as he is a reporter, perhaps more so.
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