Freedom of the press....what press?

Hiya doin boys and girls.

this is the life after career death now. well i have to be honest, last night i recived a great peice of advice from a friend that i intend to fullfill.

i was told that in order to succeed i have to set a personal discipline which i should follow religiously, so much that it turns into a habbit. knowing my self i need that sort of discipline. what makes this important is the fact that one should not be the sort of person who waits to be ordered around, one should know what to do and just do it.

that makes you your own boss, and at this time i intend to be my own boss, :)

the personal disicipline i intend to follow is going to be writing.

i vow to you that to my best efforts i will try to write you guys a story every day from my personal experiences. at times they will be short and at other times they will be full fleged features. but at least 100 words every day.

this will be my first one, well here goes!

JOURNALISM FREEDOMS IN THE UAE, WHERE REALLY IS THE PROBLEM?

A few days ago an interestin in focus article was published at gulfnews about journalism freedom. A side bar written by Abbas Al Lawati was focusing on the fact that more emiratis are needed in the business and they are the ones holding the real power behind pushing for more freedoms.

i agee in full with Abbas's conclusions but i would also like to highlight that the problem does not only last there. in uae journalism there is a plague of ethno centric styles bieng imposed upon publications.

in any local news paper today the reporting team in the trenches are either young residents who have been in the country for years before starting, educated here or even born here or they would be highly qualified individuals from abroad who have no concpet of the cultural fabric that is the UAE.

the editorial team usually would be either from major papers in south asia or east asia and at times europe or the US.

the editors are usually either locals or europeans.

now what is the problem with such a mix?

in my opinion to have unbiast, truthful reporting that would make sense to all the readers you do not need to look at market reports or who our readers are. first and foremost you should know where u live and all the back doors like the back of your hand.

i belive from editor to janitor, you have to have been raised in the UAE. its true there are not enough emiratis out there but there are more than enough people born here, in my book if you have not spent at least 15 years in the country you dont qualify.

let me give you an example, bringing a copy editor fromt he times of india who has been here for six years working. that editor will always implement what he knows best, indian journalism. in the uae the ceo or the tourist do not want to read about indian issues, or what shah rukh khan ate for breakfast, honestly, even if there 30 billion indians in the country. people want to read something in a unified language that makes sense to u and me. for such ethnocentric stroies there are 1000's of publications in thier home countries which ar available here.

for example, i would rather read about the over population of Hor al Anz district in Dubaiand unhygenic living conditions there than the philipino choir which one an award at a kareoke show!

getting back on the subject this is the UAE's press freedom limitation in my opinion. i will site an example, last summer when the whole beach sex incident hit all the papers, gulf news had the story, they ran it as a small side bar to a bigger beach decency story. in my paper a colleague alerted me to the story and i went forward to the indian news editor and requested for it to be run the next day. he looked at it and dismissed it, for two reasons, it was not significant enough for him and it was not an enterprise story.

i sat back and told him that he may have just missed on the biggest story of the summer. and he did.

this was not the first incident, many more followed, such as kerry winter's case, and the dubai fraud inquisition. the guy is definately not the sharpest tool in the shed when it coems to his news sense.

such shortcomings with in our journalists in dubai are consistent. we have to create a grass roots movement and recruit people who breathe the same air as our public and not concentrate on expertise that most ceirtainly lack it.