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Arab journalists making a difference

By David Ignatius
The Washington Post
Posted on Wednesday December 7, 2005

DUBAI – Talking with brave Arab journalists like Hussein Shobokshi, I hear the passion that animates good reporting everywhere. And it makes me all the more disgusted by recent revelations that my own government has been corrupting the nascent Iraqi free press by planting stories.

Shobokshi was fired by the Jiddah daily Okaz in 2003 after he wrote a column imagining a democratic Saudi future in which his daughter could drive, leaders were elected and the budget was public. This June, he was attacked for writing a column in Asharq al-Awsat titled, “Why Do We Hate the Jews?” He described “a very noble and polite” Jewish doctor in America who had treated his young nephew for a rare cancer and asked why Saudis were encouraged “to hate Jews and pray against them, too.”

I spent the last few days with Shobokshi and other Arab journalists at a conference here sponsored by the Aspen Institute and the Arab Thought Foundation. I heard some of the rote criticism of America and Israel that has given the Arab press a bad name over the years. But far more often, I heard a new voice of professionalism and accountability that is shaping the movement for change in the Arab world.

The best of the Arab journalists are my heroes. They are literally risking imprisonment and death to tell the truth. At a time when the U.S. media is having an identity crisis, they remind me what the news business is all about. I want to describe a few of them, so readers will understand the energy they bring to the Arab debate.

Let me start with Lebanese journalist Samir Kassir, a man who lost his life this year because he refused to trim the facts. Kassir was a columnist for the Beirut daily An Nahar who wrote fearlessly about Syria’s brutal military occupation of Lebanon. Friends warned him of the risks; some pleaded with him to stop. But he wouldn’t bend, couldn’t bend. In June he was assassinated.

I’ve met some brave Syrian journalists on several trips to Damascus this year. I won’t add to the danger by naming them, but I can summarize their message: They love their country, and they want political change. They remind me of the samizdat writers I met in Moscow a generation ago. If Syria’s rulers think they can be intimidated into silence, they’re wrong.

I visited here with Palestinian journalist Daoud Kuttab, who has been arrested by both the Palestinian Authority and the Israelis for trying to do his job. Now he’s based in Amman, running a wide-open Internet radio station for the Arab world, ammannet.net, and training radio journalists from Saudi Arabia.

And there’s the new generation of Arab television journalists. Some of the best work for al-Arabiya, a satellite news channel created three years ago as a competitor to al-Jazeera. When I ask al-Arabiya’s general manager, Abdul Rahman Rashed, to describe his mission, he keeps repeating the same word: “professionalism.” Seven al-Arabiya journalists have been killed in Iraq.

Touring al-Arabiya’s studios here, I meet a 28-year-old reporter named Wael Essam, who just left Baghdad after three years. He covered the battle of Fallujah last year from both sides, behind insurgent lines and embedded with the U.S. Army, and he has been held captive by both sides, too.

Against this background of courageous Arab reporters risking everything for their journalism, what do I see? The U.S. government has been bribing Iraqi newspapers to run “good news” stories about the American occupation of Iraq. This at a time when real Iraqi reporters are risking their lives to work for the Washington Post and other news organizations in Baghdad, because they believe in honest journalism.

Here’s a thought for an administration that claims to love freedom and democracy: Let’s try living our values, rather than just talking about them.

Washington Post Writers Group