A week of commemorating, celebrating & examining the Arab Spring
Raymond Snoddy gives an insight from Tuesday night’s launch and accompanying debate of the near-instant book ‘Mirage In The Desert? Reporting the Arab Spring’ – a book which tracks who ‘won’ and who ‘lost’ the media battle…
As autumn begins in London it has been a week of commemorating, celebrating and examining the Arab Spring.
First it was the James Cameron Memorial lecture given by Wadah Khanfar, the out-going director general of the Al-Jazeera, and with it two telling stories from the media battle to cover the revolutions in North Africa.
Khanfar told of the day when the Egyptian authorities managed to block Al-Jazeera coverage from its main satellite Nilesat. “During those hours I had the feeling we were transmitting only to ourselves in Doha,” the former Al-Jazeera director general admitted.
The solution? The Quatari-based channel offered permission to anyone who wanted to transmit the channel. Within two hours Al-Jareera was being transmitted by 14 different Middle East channels who had all suspended their own programmes to let the coverage continue. Within days the Egyptian President Mubarak had gone from power.
From the geopolitics to the personal. Khanfar told how the gift of an apple has left him in tears.
One of his cameraman Ammar Hamdan had been detained in Libya and was held in prison with colleagues for two months. On his release the prison warden apologised for what he had been forced to do and asked Hamdam to take an apple from his garden to the Al-Jazeera director general as a gift with a plea to continue the coverage.
On Tuesday night it was the launch and accompanying debate of a near instant book Mirage In The Desert? Reporting the “Arab Spring”, which tracks who “won” and who “lost” the media battle.
The headlines have inevitably turned on the live coverage from Alex Crawford and her Sky team of the fall of Tripoli to the rebels. In Mirage Crawford, surely in line for her fourth Royal Television Society award, writes movingly of how she accompanied the group of rebels she was travelling with all the way to Green Square in the heart of the Libyan capital.
Using an Apple Macbook Pro connected to an often temperamental BGAN mini-satellite dish the team scooped the world with hours of live pictures. Crawford denounced suggestions that the Sky News team were either “gung-ho” or reckless as “all rubbish”.
She emphasised that the team had 11 children between them and had everything to live for and that they had got to know and trust the group of rebels they were travelling with, which included a Libyan from Bournemouth. Sarah Whitehead, Sky’s head of international news said on Tuesday that she would not let journalists take unnecessary risks.
Kevin Bakhurst, deputy head of the BBC Newsroom explained why the BBC team led by Rupert Wingfield Hayes had decided not to proceed that evening. The BBC team had stopped to do a package for the main news bulletins and as a result had lost contact with the rebel convey. It was growing dark, they didn’t know where they were and had come under fire.
Bakhurst said it was a decision completely accepted in London, which could not second-guess decisions made on the ground in such dangerous circumstances. The BBC approach was supported on Tuesday night by Bill Neely, the international editor of ITV News, who had lost friends and colleagues during the Iraq war.
During the debate the different needs of main bulletins such as the BBC’s Ten O’Clock News and Channel 4 News and that of continuous news channels was highlighted. Programmes like the Ten still attract five million regular viewers compared with small fractions of that for the continuous news channels.
The BBC’s Middle East correspondent Jon Leyne explained, however, that in the region viewers were riveted to the live coverage of 24-hour news channels and wondered whether this was the last generation who would want traditional news packages.
The analysis and expertise could be built into continuous coverage, argued Leyne, who believes that the current period of change in the Middle East is as significant as the break-up of the Ottoman Empire a century ago.
The BBC correspondent also believes that journalists in North Africa have not just been witnesses but players. “If no journalists had made it into eastern Libya, then surely the pressure would never have built up for a no-fly zone and the subsequent Nato-led military intervention,” Leyne argues.
The majority view on Tuesday night was that while social media had been a catalyst for rebellion in Tunisia and obvious source of pictures, in countries such as Egypt it had been television and professional journalists who had made the difference.
In his contribution to Mirage, Kevin Marsh, former editor of the Today programme, argues that there had in fact been no Arab Spring. The concept was a journalistic confection, a “super-narrative” – child-like in its simplicity.
It wasn’t entirely Arab but also involved the Berbers of Morocco, who are not Arab, Kurds in Iraq, Jews in Tunisia and Coptic Christians in Egypt. The causes were different in each country – sometimes poverty and cronyism, elsewhere the frustrations of an educated middle class.
According to Marsh, it was Newsnight‘s economics editor Paul Mason who put his finger on it. For him a “protest meme” was sweeping the world – an idea that spreads rapidly from person to person.
While conceding complexity, Tuesday night’s Media Society audience thought Arab Spring conveyed the essential truth of what was happening – in particular the flow from one country to another.
The publication of Mirage in the Desert, a book put together in little more than six weeks by journalists and “hackacademics”, former journalists like Tim Luckhurst, professor of journalism at the University of Kent, itself represents a revolution in academic publishing.
It is the fifth title from Abramis academic publishing and the aim is to deal with major contemporary topics while they are still live and relevant. Traditional academics are not amused.
Joint editor John Mair, a “hackacademic” from Coventry University, notes the books are not allowed to count as research because they are not peer reviewed. At least one academic has even argued they should be stopped.
Mirage in the Desert: Reporting The “Arab Spring” Abramis £17.95