A recent 60 Minutes segment on the nation of Qatar was the most imprecise piece of journalism I can remember in the more than 20 years I’ve been watching the show.
Bob Simon, who was assigned to the story, couldn’t even pronounce the name of the country correctly. When pronounced ka-taar, the word is close to the Modern Standard Arabic noun for “train,” and also nears the colloquial word for “guitar.” The name of the country that Simon was supposedly reporting useful information on is pronounced “cutter,” with a British enunciation of the t’s and a rolled r, not like “rudder.” Simon mispronounced the country at least 11 times during the segment. Many online commenters addressed Simon’s mispronunciation of Qatar, and CBS addressed the failure online with a potato/po-totto dismissal. “[S]ome of us have been pronouncing it ‘kuh-TAR,’” 60 Minutes noted, while “others have said something closer to ‘cutter.’” In this case, “others” refers to those who bother to correctly pronounce the country’s name.
A sizeable portion of the Qatar story focused on Al Jazeera, the nation’s news powerhouse, and Simon introduced the network in a way that is both false and deeply insulting to journalists in Arab countries. “It’s called Al Jazeera,” he said, “and it does something unprecedented in the Arab world. It covers the news.” While Simon was on his posh junket in sunny Qatar, Arab journalists were risking life and limb in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Somalia. I hope they’re spared Simon’s ignorant potshot. Reporters at The Daily News Egypt, the Al Ghad newspaper in Jordan, and news organizations in Kuwait are also doing courageous journalism at great personal risk, to name just a few.
More than once, Simon suggests Al Jazeera caused the Arab uprisings, calling it “the engine of the Arab spring.” The engine. I thought it was Twitter. No? Facebook? Thomas Jefferson? I was in the Middle East during the early weeks and months of the Arab spring. To flatly claim there was a single, technological cause for the Arab awakening is at best not testable, at worst a bald fabrication. Simon repeated his conclusion that Al Jazeera caused Arab regime change to Qatar’s ruler, Emir Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, who was skeptical. Al Jazeera “got [Arab dictators] overthrown,” Simon said. “I’m not sure if Al Jazeera was behind this,” the emir said.
“There have been no protests, no calls for democracy” in Qatar, Simon reported. This is half true. No, Qatar hasn’t been rocked by protests as have some other Arab states. But it’s inaccurate to suggest that all Qataris are satisfied with life in their small country, and that no bloggers, activists, or women’s rights advocates are calling for more political legitimacy. When discussing media and politics with the emir, an unelected dictator, Simon didn’t bother to ask him about laws that criminalize political dissent. Criticizing the emir or any of his divinely special relatives is a ticket to prison.
Simon, who has covered the Middle East for decades, must have known that Al Jazeera is forbidden to challenge the dictator who sat perched before him. Al Jazeera is known for its tough coverage of Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, but gives its own government either fairy tale coverage or little at all. The Qatari press is permitted to challenge the legitimacy of any dictatorship but its own. There is a “[g]laring…gap between the courageous tone of Al Jazeera journalists on international news and the restraint, even self-censorship, shown by the channel’s journalists and those of other national media in relation to Qatari issues,” argues Reporters Without Borders.
The network is not, then, fully independent, as Simon announced in his report. “This was the first and the only network in the Arab world that was independent,” he said. “Everyone else was just doing what their government told them to do.”
The goal of creating a 13-minute segment on a small country for a general-interest audience is a good one; a 60 Minutes story on Qatar wasn’t necessarily doomed from the beginning. No one is saying the story has to be as detailed as Wendell Steavenson’s letters from Cairo in The New Yorker.
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The criticism of the pronunciation is so fatuous as to cast into doubt everything else. Wikipedia disagrees with you, for one thing, but more importantly I'd guess that 80% of Americans who have ever pronounced the name use something like "cah-tahr". You may object to that but your objection is irrelevant.
Local pronunciation is of course not the standard for most country names; every living American including you pronounces the a in "France" like in "cat" not "father," and 99% of them pronounce the x in "Mexico" as an English rather than Spanish "x." (Not to mention saying "Spain" instead of "Espana" etc. etc. etc. etc.). Names that "look" the same in English and in their local language (though here that's transliterated!), and that are less familiar, tend to cause this confusion - but that doesn't excuse your falling into it at such length and with such vitriol.
#1 Posted by Matt, CJR on Wed 15 Feb 2012 at 01:28 PM
Well, Matt, if Wikipedia disagrees with me....I'm sunk, right?
#2 Posted by Justin Martin, CJR on Wed 15 Feb 2012 at 02:17 PM
"More than once, Simon suggests Al Jazeera caused the Arab uprisings, calling it “the engine of the Arab spring.” The engine. I thought it was Twitter. No? Facebook? Thomas Jefferson? I was in the Middle East during the early weeks and months of the Arab spring. To flatly claim there was a single, technological cause for the Arab awakening is at best not testable, at worst a bald fabrication."
It might be more accurate to say that twitter, facebook, and cellphones were effective tools of social organization, without which those revolutions would not have had much likelihood of success, but it's important that we don't understate Al' Jazeera's contribution to Middle East identity and their changing relationship to their powers that be.
http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2005-03-06/news/0503050068_1_arab-status-quo-satellite
The internet handed out the tools, but Al'Jazeera gave those tools purpose.
#3 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Thu 16 Feb 2012 at 01:19 AM
Actually Matt, most Americans don't say it that way. Everyone that I know says it correctly because the soldiers in Iraq went there A LOT for vacation during tours and so they say it correctly and that was the first time I had ever heard of the country was from a Marine buddy of mine.
#4 Posted by Tom-AZ, CJR on Thu 16 Feb 2012 at 09:46 AM
The pronunciation issue might sound churlish but, as someone who has lived in Qatar, I would say that it is an issue that can tip the balance when taking a reporter or researcher seriously. The general critique, though, is spot on, accurately highlighting the obsequious approach to profiling countries such as Qatar and the UAE.
On the issue of Al Jazeera - though they weren't the engine of the Arab Spring, I do wonder how events in Egypt would have unfolded without their unyielding (and embarrassingly biased) support and coverage. Bear in mind that, although some naive youth in Egypt think that they are the standard bearers of the revolution (not dissimilar to the exuberance and zeal of first-time student activists who think that they are the first to have thought of something...), popular movements to overthrow the regime have been active for decades - and in large numbers.
The difference is that these were largely Islamic in nature and so weren't covered or adopted by a press corps who largely preferred them not to succeed. Such movements were dismissed as extremists' attempts to impose their ideology on an unsupportive public, though, as the elections in Egypt have somewhat demonstrated, their popular support was actually very far-reaching among the wider community. Furthermore, because in principle their goal was no different to any other ideological cause, whether democratic or socialist, it should not be up to the press to decide which is more worthy of their support and coverage.
The recent demonstrations, however, were initiated and organised (extremely well i might add) by a core group of secular activists calling for secular (whether liberal or leftist) mandate. The support provided to them by Al Jazeera (and subsequently by CNN, BBC etc) painted a breathless image of nation-wide popular movement (e.g. reporting 1m in Tahrir, which holds no more than 250k), which then became a self-fulfilling prophecy. That Al-Jazeera was instrumental in first creating and then sustaining the revolution's momentum cannot be denied.
#5 Posted by Bekay1, CJR on Fri 17 Feb 2012 at 03:51 PM