Doha cracks open the books for a free press

Across the years some have argued that the most important factor needed to ensure that people are free — politically, intellectually and creatively free, to be entrepreneurs, inventors and discoverers — is education. Others have said it is journalism. Those of us in journalism education have a double responsibility and a double opportunity. Right now we at Northwestern University have that double opportunity in Doha’s Education City, to which we were invited by the Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development. When we accepted the Qatar Foundation’s invitation to bring Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism to the Region, there were more than a few skeptics. They told us that an American journalism school could not practice here what it preaches there, reminding us that the media here are owned or licensed by governments, that women are often abused here and gay people persecuted, that rich men here often