Al Jazeera, Freedom of the Press, and Forecasting Humanitarian Emergencies

Yehia Ghanem

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367515737
• eBook ISBN: 9781000168112
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Journalist Biographies

This book reveals how Al Jazeera and its news coverage became a force for change politically, socially and culturally in the Middle East in general, and the Arab world in particular.

It explores pre-Al Jazeera and post-Al Jazeera representations of humanitarian crises and identifies a potentially significant partnership between the news organizations and humanitarian actors. By tracing the evolution of the news network, the book sheds new light on how Al Jazeera effected change in the Global South. The research identifies a significant relationship between Al Jazeera's news coverage and the ability to forecast international humanitarian actions, politically and militarily. It also explores the potential for continued partnership between humanitarian actors and news organization to identify crises in their early stages. Lastly, the book examines the distinct, original lexicon developed by Al Jazeera for humanitarian affairs and shows how the network influenced international media stylebooks and changed humanitarian coverage on key global issues.

A compelling examination of Al Jazeera's news operation that will be of interest to students and scholars of media studies, political communication, journalism and news reporting, international politics and the media, and Arab media.

1 A Voice in the Wilderness

The Early Years of Building Al Jazeera From the Ground Up

Al-Ahram

In December of 1875, two Lebanese immigrants founded the Al-Ahram newspaper in Alexandria, Egypt. Over the past 143 years of continuous daily publications, Al-Ahram has grown to be one of the oldest media conglomerates and also a highly respected economic empire. I was one of the lucky few to join Al-Ahram in the late 1980s. Within a few years, I became the paper’s war correspondent, trekking from one war zone to another across three continents. Since the late 1980s and until 1996, when Al Jazeera was born, I always felt that Al-Ahram was the most prestigious newspaper in the Middle East and Africa. It seemed to me that it was the lone voice in the wilderness crying out against humanitarian catastrophes, be they human-made conflicts or natural disasters. Indeed, we were in the middle of all wars, from the first Chechen one; to the Serbo-Croatian and Bosnian wars; to the war in Afghanistan between the Taliban and Northern Alliance to the wars in Congo, Sierra Leone and Angola, although for the sake of the truth, Al-Ahram’s war coverage was almost absent after October 6, 1973, and the war between Egypt and Israel, not to reappear until the end of the 1980s.

Since the end of the 1980s, Al-Ahram’s war coverage was penned by one war correspondent, myself. I was the only reporter covering conflict at the newspaper from the late 1980s until 2010. Even though war was my “beat,” during my early years on the job, I hardly knew the crucial role media could play in directing and redirecting humanitarian relief to disaster-stricken areas. I must admit that I came to realize media’s critical role only after I received a note from the Supreme Committee of Humanitarian Relief in Egypt at the end of 1994, informing me that I was to be decorated their “Man of The Year.” The award came in recognition of my efforts to raise public awareness of the horrors and agonies of the Bosnians who were suffering. At that time, satellite television channels were newborns in the west and entirely unknown in the Middle East.

I received the award at the pinnacle of Al-Ahram’s success: we had a daily circulation of 1.9 million, including the international edition, 1.7 million for the weekly Friday edition, and readership was up fivefold. Al-Ahram was at the height of its influence, setting the agenda for local television and to a certain extent for many TV stations in the Arab world. In the second half of the 1990s, my war coverage was syndicated to at least 20 leading newspapers across the Arab world, which multiplied the paper’s impact. It is worth mentioning that Al-Ahram was one of the few Arab media outlets at the time that covered wars in the Middle East.

Al-Ahram’s prominence in conflict coverage remained almost unchallenged until Al Jazeera was born in 1996. After that, I started seeing colleagues from the channel in the same conflict zones that I covered. During those years, I saw that war reporters from Al Jazeera would be essential to the programming and that the channel would focus on covering conflicts more than other news topics. However, Al Jazeera’s coverage of both human-made and natural disasters came to distinction later, at the beginning of the new millennium, and the reasons for this shift had to do with the unique phases of development the channel went through. It quickly grew to be a giant network in the region. Although we must give credit to Al-Ahram for keeping the tradition of war coverage in the news by having a sole war correspondent from the late 1980s up until 2010, it pales in comparison to the role Al Jazeera would play in crisis coverage ever since. The difference between Al-Ahram’s effort and that of Al Jazeera is massive, and that difference can be attributed to the organizational structures built by the network and the way it institutionalized war coverage. For this reason, Al-Ahram’s effort was almost a cry in the wilderness, whereas Al Jazeera’s was the antithesis of vox clamantis in deserto.

The Early Years From 1996 to 2001: “The Opinion and the Other Opinion”

Until 1996 and for at least half a century, the Arab world and the Middle East, in general, had a media structure that could only be characterized as a monolithic block repeating monotonous speech, an industry controlled by dictatorial regimes that used media to consolidate their powers. Even in the 1990s when they had to allow private media, tyrannical regimes controlled them by controlling the businessmen who owned the media outlets. The main target of Al Jazeera since the first day of operation has been to break the monopoly maintained by dictatorships in the Middle East for so long. The way the new channel achieved this was by introducing a vanguard motto that heralded a new era in the region, not only in media but also, and more importantly, in political life. The motto was “Introducing the Opinion and the Other Opinion,” in a region where one and only one opinion had been allowed for so long, that of the regimes. This change was a real revolution that profoundly impacted the heavily censored media. More importantly, it shook up many dictatorial regimes and pushed them to effect some positive changes.

During the years from 1996 to 2001, the perspective of providing a platform for a wide range of voices in the Middle East became a confirmed faith and a way to gain growing trust and credibility in the eyes of the people of the region. It also evoked extreme animosity toward Al Jazeera, and by extension Qatar, from almost all of the regimes in the area.

In his book, Al Jazeera English: Global News in a Changing World, Seib Philip argues that when Al Jazeera English (AJE) was born in 2006, it was the first among its sibling networks to bring a voice to the voiceless through its unique focus on the developing world in good times and bad.¹ But AJE was an extension of the trend the network had spearheaded from its first day of broadcasting as Al Jazeera’s Arabic channel in 1996.

In Search of Independent Arab Journalists: Building Confidence, Building Journalists

Since game-changing media is not really about the state-of-the-art equipment or how sharply the cameras can focus but rather how independent journalists can be, Al Jazeera had a challenging mission from the start. In an environment as hostile to free and independent journalism as the Arab world had been for so long, independent journalists were a rare commodity. Salah Negm came in to direct the network news programming. A veteran TV journalist who started his career as a presenter for Egyptian radio in the early 1980s, he then moved to Radio Netherlands and later to the BBC’s Arabic service. He moved on to Doha in 1996 to be one of the founders of Al Jazeera television and its first legendary director of news. Negm, currently the director of news for Al Jazeera English, recalls how hard it was in those early days.

“Recruiting, training and leading a staff of Arab journalists who came from countries like Iraq, Sudan and Egypt where they worked mainly for State-controlled newspapers, TV and media outlets was the toughest challenge I had in the beginning. The difficulty of the task was due to trying to mold those journalists’ thinking into the freedom of expression and to tell the facts as they were without government intervention or self-censorship. The old habit of wait-to-follow-orders-coming-from-above was hard to overcome,” he told me. “Coming from countries where authoritarian regimes indoctrinated them, it was a tough task to convince journalists that they have a paper in which they are free to write as long as they are factual, balanced and fair. The task was also about empowering journalists with knowledge so that they would be able to form their views and concepts freely. It was so tough it took us three to four years to change the collective state of mind of our staff journalists toward that direction,” he explained. “Coming from the British Broadcasting Corporation [BBC] where I worked for many years as the executive news producer, I had the chance, along with a host of BBC journalists, to go from the BBC to Al Jazeera.” Negm told me that this core group of journalists helped in recruiting and training the new staff of journalists.

It seems that the crisis runs deeper and is more profound than we might think. Many of the journalists who train and work in the west for free and independent media fall back to the mentality of controlled media once they are back in the Arab world. The interesting, yet sad, part of it is the geographical impact on how journalists perceive freedom of expression. They hold a sense of being free when they live in the west, but that leaves them when they go back to their Arab countries. I asked Negm about this strange mental transition, and he answered by saying, “Let me be frank, even that group of the BBC staff had a mixture of cultures; some of them moved to London fleeing their tyrannical regimes in the Arab world. Then, the BBC service recruited some from their countries, and others migrated from their homes in search of a better life or just more freedom. Each one of them had a different background. When they went back to the Arab world (Qatar) to work for Al Jazeera, each had their perception of how the new TV should be. Some of them felt the draw back to the same State-controlled media culture, and that was another challenge. Yes, the geographical impact you referred to is real,” Negm confirmed.

“However, there is another aspect to that backward movement. Those Arab journalists who came back from the west to work for Al Jazeera had to navigate uncharted waters in the Middle East for the first time. Nevertheless, the determination of both Qatar’s leadership and the top management of the channel enabled those journalists to sail that uncharted water and help them adopt a sense of freedom in their own part of the world,” Negm pointed out.

As if the geographical impact was not enough challenge to Al Jazeera, they were later confronted by another challenge, which occurred during the first years of the network’s existence. The other challenge was the impact of the exploding growth of military, ideological and political conflicts that have plagued those journalists’ Arab countries in the newsroom and on the television screen.

“Another group of Arab journalists who fled their countries to the west because of their political ideologies sought to implement those ideologies once they were here at Al Jazeera. The way we dealt with them was by setting vision, values and principles. Therefore, if we detected an ‘opinion-smelling script,’ it was immediately discarded. Also, in the case of a one-credible-sourced fact-based script, we insisted that it must be balanced with another point of view. We have always had an efficient structure,” the veteran journalist said as he charted out the network’s methodology.

“Another aspect of the challenge was having a working group of only about 20 to 25 former BBC staff, which was not enough to staff and train a large organization like Al Jazeera. That group had to work around the clock on a daily basis for the first four years to prepare the environment for a functioning, independent free press. Eventually, the group who stood up for press values prevailed,” Negm stated.

About the difference between managing the diverse newsroom staffs of Al Jazeera Arabic (AJA) and Al Jazeera English, Negm said the difference was mostly between the time he started with AJA in 1996 and then the later years when he led the AJE newsroom. “Human nature is the same regardless of nationality, but once you have good journalists, they will fly with freedom, objectivity, accuracy, balance and fairness—all the things good journalists would want, provided they can be certain they would not risk going to prison because of doing journalism the best they can. Therefore, it was difficult at the beginning, but once the right people were placed and principles embedded in the culture of the channel, there was no significant difference in managing the two different newsrooms—it was a straightforward operation,” Negm explained. “However, proper staffing and good training do not rule out individual attempts to color news according to their ideology or for the sake of cultural benefit. Nevertheless, with a robust structure of check and balance and open discussion, these kinds of practices almost vanish. When you reach this point, there is no difference between running a newsroom in Arabic or English,” Negm confirmed.

Ayman Gaballah is a seasoned journalist who started his career in Egyptian TV before he moved to work for Al Jazeera Arabic on the first week of its launch in November 1996. Gaballah eventually became a deputy chief editor and now is director of Al Jazeera Mubashir (AJM), which is a channel similar to the US-based C-SPAN TV but with more live coverage from all over the world, with a focus on the Middle East. As a deputy chief editor of AJA, Gaballah managed to lead a diverse staff, most of whom were coming from Arab state-controlled media. Additionally, they came from conflicting countries, yet AJA bet on revolutionizing stagnated Arab media and even employed journalists indoctrinated by dictatorships, who were brought up in ultranationalist journalism culture. Gaballah told me how he managed this situation. “We did not try to solve their countries’ conflicts. Instead, we managed these conflicts all the time while in the newsroom by setting a golden rule: We all have to take off our ideological hats at the doorstep of the newsroom and keep only professionalism. Although it has been a big challenge, it worked. The mechanism we have been using to do so was the daily editorial meetings where we discussed, argued and explored all options before we set the perspective. As for dealing with journalists, many of them brought up on ultranationalist cultures with all the risks involved in rendering a polarized newsroom, we followed a strict code of professionalism to avoid such polarization,” he added. “However, there were times when we had to deal with a few severe cases of polarization.”

Establishing a New Culture of Diversity and Freedom of Speech

Ayman Gaballah went on to explain the benefits of a newsroom characterized by diversity and an open dialogue.

“For instance, during the coverage when fighting erupted in September 2007 between the Lebanese army and the Palestinian fighters in the River Bard Refugee Camp, some of our Lebanese colleagues whom we knew as open-minded and liberal, suddenly turned very nationalistic. Nevertheless, we made use of their view to try to be more balanced. In the meantime, it is noteworthy that human stories like civilians being killed ends any polarization,” the seasoned journalist pointed out.

“Regardless of how anybody puts it, AJA since day one represented an unprecedented window of relieving distressed peoples in the Middle East who have been deprived of their basic God-given right of expression. Moreover, AJA was a game changer in the Middle East in the sense of being more progressive than all the politics in the region,” Gaballah said.

“In the meantime, having such diversity of newsroom staff that represented all Arab countries enabled us to bring to light the peripherals of the Arab world such as Somalia, Mauritania and other countries that were ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 A Voice in the Wilderness: The Early Years of Building Al Jazeera From the Ground Up
• 2 From South to North: Reversing the Flow of Information While Covering War and Disaster
• 3 A New Kind of Humanitarian Journalism: Partnerships, Coalitions, Research and Investigations
• 4 Case Studies and Al Jazeera’s Next Phase: Protecting Journalists and Human Rights and Predicting Disaster
• 5 The Power of Words: Between Al Jazeera’s Humanitarian Stylebook and the Hateful Rhetoric of Radio Rwanda
• 6 Ethics and Values of Good Journalism in a Dictatorial Environment
• Conclusion: Global Press Freedoms Under Attack
• Index