Once, responsibility was not the big thing in serious media, and serious media were those British newspapers that took you two minutes to fold into a readable format while taking the train to work. Today, successful advertising agencies are serious media, responsibility is what all serious media aspire to, and Middle Eastern journalism is ethically challenged.
Are regional media going where the consumer wants or where special interests herd them. It is not an overt theme. Special interests are by and large an open secret: everybody knows it goes on but nobody really tries to do anything about.
Take the recent libel case reported in the London Guardian in which Sheika Mouza, wife of the Qatari emir, Sheikh Hamad Bin Khalifa Al-Thani, filed a libel suit against the largest daily in post-Saddam Iraq, Azzaman, published by Saad Al-Bazzaz. During the trial in British court, papers were presented to show that Al-Bazzaz had received £2.5 million by bank wire from Saudi Arabia, presumably to finance the paper, which was established in London and then moved to Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein. Media reports in Qatar suggested that certain Saudi officials, angered by the Sheika’s initiatives in furthering women’s education, used the funds to press for the printing of the slanderous material. While conceding that Azzaman, when still based in London, had indeed libeled Sheika Mouza, the lawyers for Al-Bazzaz denied that the paper and its owner had been involved in a propaganda plot instigated in Riyadh.
Consider it an example of the not-so-uncommon special-interest media activities in the Middle East. Anyone in this region who would be honestly surprised by the thought that one party could covertly finance a media published in Europe or elsewhere by a willing propagandist and use this tool to undermine the name of another party would have to be oblivious to the region’s habits of intrigue and disinformation. These patterns have been etched into the history of Arab journalism for about 50 years.
When Egyptian journalist and activist Saad Ibrahim told a Beirut media conference last year that the credibility of Arab journalism had waned and vanished in the same degree to which the region’s media of that epoch had been willing to distort the realities when proclaiming constant victories in the fight against the state of Israel – he harvested anything but unilateral consent from Lebanese journalists in the audience. Ibrahim linked the failing honesty of Arab media to the pressures from governments to the lies of the past. Did he overstep a taboo line?
In discussing the region’s special-interest journalism, one has to accept that loyalty to persons carries an image of normalcy and honor in Middle Eastern culture. This perception of the virtue of loyalty may weigh in favor of partisanship when individual journalists and entire media organizations tend to discount the concepts of impartiality and relentless pursuit of facts. Thus, journalists and media owners in particular have to ask very carefully what is to be gained and what is to be lost by prioritizing loyalty – which is perhaps the same challenge American media faced frequently during the war on Iraq.
But this constellation of priorities can never allow for media to knowingly condone outright lies or even concoct them and it cannot be an answer to the problem of special interests – particularly the kind of special interests that are motivated by sheer greed, cowardice, or foolish disdain for essential human dignity. If some media sell out for such despicable reasons, it is the duty of all other media to stand up to their malice. The only other option is to cease being media. To achieve this, media in the region have still a long distance to cover.
Another claw at the throat of Lebanese media is the absence of transparency in addressing special interest problems within the profession. A leading example is the accreditation of journalists through the Order of the Press. It is a well-known and thoroughly unhealthy situation that qualified Lebanese journalists have for years been unable to gain entry into the syndicate of journalists at the press order. But there has never been an OFFICIAL explanation.
Under the table, the conspiracy theory is that a single large secto-political interest group rigged the game by registering a bunch of new print publications. Admitting new journalists freely to the professional organization, so goes the theory, would give this group the opportunity to have excessive numbers of its followers to be accredited and subsequently gain dominion over the syndicate.
The allegation is not so implausible that it could be dismissed lightly. Stranger things have happened in Lebanon. However, the people who should be able to clarify the situation – media people the lot of them – would not do so. When asked about the causes of the accreditation blockage, media leaders from the two branches of the press order and from major newspapers repeatedly seemed curiously non-committal. Some paid lip service to the need for change of the situation, others just played out the lamest of excuses. None seemed very interested to press the matter and go on record with statements that would open the issue to journalistic investigation.
Balance of precarious powers on the small Lebanese stage is the paradigm of coexistence. It would be naïve to expect the established media to seek direct confrontation with irrational forces powerful enough and perfectly willing to control their existence. This is the kind of thing that revolutionary media do in novels and movies but if it happens at all in real life, it is a slow and arduous going . Consequently, the direction of politically effective Lebanese media for some time to come must be expected to be dependent on special interests rather than reader interest. In this scenario, the problem of economic interests looks like a temporal nuisance.
Here now is one question to ask: how does this lack of media accountability, transparency and integrity affect media consumers? The obvious answer is, it drives intelligent readers and viewers away. This is the moment to shift to a larger horizon, by taking into consideration the situation of the mass media at large and risking another look to the online world and its meaning for the media.
Check the blog – the current whole new phenomenon of online communication. Short for web-log, a blog is essentially a personal internet homepage oriented towards ongoing dialogue about topical or personal content. A blog is low-cost, can be continuously updated with material, and alerts the network to new postings. Blogs attracted about 32 million readers in the US in 2004, according to studies published in December (at the same time, 58% of the US population doesn’t know what a blog is).
In 2004, blogging rose to fame in the US when bloggers uncovered journalistic inaccuracies by mainstream media. Blogging is now being associated with “grassroots” or “participatory” journalism, phrases stipulating that the blog is to the modern individual what Gutenberg’s press was to Martin Luther, the door granting entry to publishing.
Blogs will be the absolute thing for perhaps a few years and in the longer perspective, the idea of participatory journalism has yet to answer many questions. But the amazing involvement of bloggers in political and civic responsibility is a contra-indicator to the idea that shrinking newspaper readership (which is a universal experience of print media) can be blamed on the general dwindling of civil virtues.
If people don’t read newspapers or magazines, it’s because they are not interesting enough. Stakeholder trust is the working capital of any media. It makes a qualitative but perhaps not so much a quantitative difference whether media organizations deny their main stakeholder basis – their audience – because they are stuck on outdated models or are slaves to the desires of special interests.
The future of the media is stakeholder responsibility. All parties have to take their roles and influence more seriously and think of the consequences of what they do. Newspapers, media and advertising industry have one big, shared responsibility in this: listening to the audience. It may be too idealistic to be for real, but at least in the way of a better vision it could happen that greater demand for quality journalism, formulated eloquently by the very real sophisticated media audiences of Lebanon, whether using blogs, letters to the editor, or any other means of proactivity in communication, would add significant momentum to the demise of special interest tyranny from the media domain here.
Participatory journalism in this society may open new horizons for journalism and become part of an antidote to also the economic troubles of media organizations here, and elsewhere. The good associate news on the business side is that online advertising – which has once again a positive outlook – and the emergence of corporate blogs in marketing are opening new pathways for media revenues.
NB: For the record, this writer was alerted to the news story on the Azzaman investigation by a blog, maintained by a Lebanese born academic in California under the name angryarab.
