In Information 3.0 class on Thursday we hosted several guest speakers. These speakers were journalists from several Middle Eastern countries and I must admit I was surprised by how much we were able to learn. I ignorantly had the initial perception that all Middle Eastern countries had the same journalistic guidelines of censorship and government control. While it is true that some of the countries have strict guidelines, other countries such as Lebanon have strong freedom of speech. However, even though some countries legally have freedom of speech, the general populace believes in a certain tradition of not touching certain topics in the media. The most common topic that is not allowed or discouraged in the Middle East is news about the president, the king, the prime minister, the cabinet, and their families. Basically the high government officials are off-limits.
There have been journalists killed or publicly humiliated because they came to close to this topic. For one country, the media had posted a picture of the king’s son and the government asked them to just call them when they have another photograph of the royal family so they can approve it first. Then, when they got another royal photograph and called for the approval, the government sent a bunch of police to surround their building and take all their photographs! This is just crazy because the journalists were just politely doing what was asked of them.
The topic of women’s rights in the journalism field came up and one country actually stated that their journalism field and journalism schools were completely overrun with women. This is in contrast to women rights in Saudi Arabia which are very restrictive. Women are not even allowed to be considered journalists. Women are considered “freelancers”. In Saudi Arabia, women are not even allowed to drive so a “freelancing” journalist cannot even drive to get to a big story. And then women are not even allowed to hire a chauffeur until they are 35! I think this is really cruel and unjust because women are perfectly capable of being excellent journalists alongside men. Also, I found it really shocking that our guest from Saudi Arabia was a woman. I have a huge amount of respect for her because she’s independent and pursuing a career that is extremely difficult to succeed in in her country. She even had the guts to ask her editor-in-chief why women didn’t have more rights in the journalism field.
The discussion of the availability of outside media was also very interesting. Some countries had CNN blocked, but others were free to view it. One guest even said that Google translate was blocked in his country so he wouldn’t be able to translate English news. However, a lot of the guests said that journalists often try to access outside news sources. Though, the guest from Morocco said that the relationship between local and outside news was more mutualistic in areas with a higher socio-economic level. You never hear bad things about the areas with more money, and there’s bad news about the poorer countries.
Overall, this class was extremely enlightening and interesting and I am really glad we had this opportunity to see journalism from a different perspective.
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