'Voice of the voiceless' - Al Jazeera's response over Saudi-led blog gag pressure

The Doha headquarters of the global news network. Photo: Al Jazeera

An important media freedom statement: An open letter from Al Jazeera
Republished on Café Pacific from the Doha-based global news network

OVER two decades ago, Al Jazeera Arabic was launched with a simple mission: to provide reliable information to viewers across the Arab world. Ten years later, in 2006, Al Jazeera English began broadcasting with the same mission - to provide people around the world with accurate, balanced and impartial information.

When Al Jazeera Arabic went on air in 1996, it was unique in the Arab world. Most media in the region at the time were state-controlled and often unchallenged mouthpieces for the different rulers and governments in the region. Al Jazeera was different, a truly independent voice, with a mission to hear and report the human stories that were otherwise ignored; to cover events with balance and integrity; and to hold power to account.

Al Jazeera Arabic quickly gained a huge and loyal audience across the region. The information we provided became a lifeline to millions of people who wanted to know what was really going on around them.

Beirut and Paris: Two terror attacks with different tales

Mourners at the Auckland, New Zealand, vigil for Paris at the weekend. Photo: David Robie

By Belen Fernandez

AS NEWS arrived of terror attacks in Paris that ultimately left more than 120 people dead, US President Barack Obama characterised the situation as “heartbreaking” and an assault “on all of humanity.”

But his presidential sympathy was conspicuously absent the previous day when terror attacks in Beirut left more than 40 dead. Predictably, Western media and social media were much less vocal about the slaughter in Lebanon.

The Independent's weekend front page, UK.

And while many of us are presumably aware, to some degree, of the discrepancy in value assigned to people's lives on the basis of nationality and other factors, the back-to-back massacres in Beirut and Paris served to illustrate without a doubt the fact that, when it comes down to it, “all of humanity” doesn't necessarily qualify as human.

Of course, there's more to the story than the relative dehumanisation of the Lebanese as compared with their French counterparts. There's also the prevailing notion in the West that — as far as bombs, explosions, and killings go — Lebanon is simply One of Those Places Where Such Things Happen.

The same goes for places like Iraq, to an even greater extent, which is part of the reason we don't see Obama mourning attacks on all of humanity every time he reads the news out of Baghdad.

A date with the ghosts of Balibo

FORMER ABC journalist Tony Maniaty, now a senior journalism lecturer at the University of Technology, Sydney, has scored a coup with his new book on East Timor - Shooting Balibo. He covered the war in the self-declared independent former Portuguese colony in 1975 for ABC TV News and came under heavy shelling in Balibo. A few days later, five other journalists working for Australian media - who had ignored his warnings not to go to Balibo - were murdered by Indonesian soldiers in the dusty border town. The martyred journalists were Brian Peters, Gary Cunningham, Malcolm Rennie, Greg Shackleton and Anthony Stewart.

Maniaty was aged 26 during the war. Thirty-three years later, in his role as consultant to the forthcoming feature film Balibo about these gruesome Indonesian killings, Maniaty returned to Balibo for the first time.

Shooting Balibo is his memoir of going back to that traumatic event, and of how Timor has changed since. Together with the haunting experience of watching five young actors playing his murdered colleagues (and watching himself portrayed as a young reporter), Maniaty also conducted revealing interviews with some of Timor's key players, including President Ramos-Horta, about the events that led up to the Indonesian invasion.

In the book, Maniaty joins the cast and crew of Balibo as they travel to the gutted shell of the burned house where his colleagues were killed a generation earlier. The book has already had an emotional and well-received launch in Timor. Maniaty reflects:

They say we've only got one war in us, and my days in Timor in 1975 were enough to teach me many things, not least that experience in the house of conflict is expanded, and that the exhilaration of war, once felt, can never be replicated in everyday life; that risk goes hand in hand with raw beauty; that life is never so intense as it is, or was, in that compression of life called war...

Tony Maniaty's article about television war reporting in Pacific Journalism Review.
The Shooting Balibo trailer

Robert Fisk's recipe for young journo success

TRUE believers? A host of them trooped in for the Robert Fisk lecture/ student news exchange organised by the Pacific Media Centre at AUT University. Where were the sceptics?

Apart from the core of AUT student journalists, radio and TV students and staff who had ditched their mid-semester break to come along to be challenged, inspired - and even entertained - by Fisky, there were academics, civil rights activists and many others. Robert Fisk was in NZ for a promotional tour for his latest book, The Age of the Warrior.

The AUT booking was thanks to Amnesty International. The lecture theatre (chosen for its intimacy and which normally seats 160 people) was packed out with at least another 40 or 50 people for the hour-long lunch date. Just as well there were no health and safety hawks drifting around. Fisk was at his inspirational best - it's quite extraordinary to see a journalist having such a cult following. Many editors were sighted in the audience, including the NZ Herald's former editor-in-chief Gavin Ellis, who chose the AUT rather than his own University of Auckland bash, which was charging $25 a head for a Fisk Amnesty fundraiser.

Fisk had plenty of gems on offer for his audience including anecdotes about his contempt for how the internet has become "a system of hate". Scolding media for not reporting the full truth about the Middle East, he also had some advice for the neophite journos that wouldn't go down too well with either the digital natives or the digital grandstanders:

• "Write only for newspapers, which print what you write as you write it".


• "Get on a good relationship with a trustworthy editor. If you can't find the right newspaper in New Zealand - and I can imagine what you might reply to me - look elsewhere."


• "Don't go into blogging, it doesn't work. It doesn't have the integrity that the printed paper has - you won't get into mainstream journalism that way, anyway."


• "Don't refer to the mainstream press as the mainstream press."


• "Don't waste your time writing for the alternative press because it is only read by believers."


• "Challenge your government."
  
  
• PMC photographer Alan Koon captured Te Waha Nui editor James Murray (top right) joining the believers at the book signing after he had seized an earlier moment to video the scribe in full force.
  


• Pacific Media Centre's Melissa Fidow's audio report
• PMC Katie Llanos-Small's profile on Robert Fisk
• PMC photo gallery on Fisk
• Other Fisk reports
• Only the internet can stop Robert Fisk