“This a country where barbers used to do the job of doctors,” says Abdelmonem Said, head of Egypt’s al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies, who writes a newspaper column but does not consider himself a journalist. “We should not refer to [bloggers] as journalists unless they are qualified to perform the job of a journalist. Defending an activist in the name of journalism further complicates an already complicated situation.”
Professionalism is the best defense for Arab and Iranian journalists; facts their ultimate ally.
If everything written on the Web is equal, governments have an excuse to crack down on it all. And if journalist rights groups throw in their lot with political activists, it will be hard to make a case that jailed Iranian and Arab journalists shouldn’t be tried right alongside “cyberdissidents” advocating revolution and militants who throw bombs.
Read CPJ’s response here.
The real threat to Middle Eastern journalism is the lack of press freedom in those countries. Blogging etc is partly a response to that. It's surely no coincidence that countries with high levels of education but limited press freedom, such as China and Iran, have hugely active political blogospheres. It's increasingly difficult to define exactly what constitutes "a journalist", but one can probably say that some blogging is journalism while some of the content in officially-accredited media is not.
#1 Posted by tom s, CJR on Mon 21 Sep 2009 at 12:45 PM
could you please provide details of the 'recent survey' that found that more than 70 percent of Arab journalists believe a lack of professionalism is the greatest threat to their profession—greater even than government control.
You are criticising bloggers for lack of professional skills yet you cite a study with no details whatsoever.
I would believe a good blogger would have def. had a premalink to the original source of the survey!!!
#2 Posted by Maha, CJR on Tue 22 Sep 2009 at 09:08 AM
I find it strange to be criticizing others for lack of freedom of press, especially with no criticism of what is occurring in this country that is serving to destroy all the newspapers and the pressure to turn both newspapers and journalists in this country into "blog sites" and "bloggers" pushing opinions instead of facts. Where is that criticism?
#3 Posted by Elaine Cullen, CJR on Sat 24 Oct 2009 at 08:59 PM
Have to disagree here. Freedom of the press, in U.S. legal parlance, protects the 'lonely pamphleteer' just as it protects trained, full time reporters. Many bloggers are activists, yes, just as Thomas Paine was.
Governments in the Arab/Muslim world are now concocting schemes to force bloggers to be licensed by their regimes. Bloggers here break stories, stretch government red lines, and often pay heavy prices. According to Reporters without Borders, Egypt has arrested several hundred bloggers in just the last few years. That's a lot of jailed pamphleteers. Why shouldn't RSF and other press freedom groups--CPJ, Freedom House, Nieman Watchdog, etc.--immediately and loudly come to their defense?
Additionally, I don't see any evidence that press liberty groups vocally defending Egyptian bloggers have harmed press freedoms or weakened professionalism among the mainstream Egyptian press.
#4 Posted by Justin Martin, CJR on Sat 2 Oct 2010 at 06:44 AM
i find it amazing that u'd rather maintain the nature of journalism in a stagnant static sense, rather than have it develop and change to adopt the various new spurring methods of transmitting information to the populace. It must be understood that if Journalism didn't change to adopt these new forms, it will die out in the next few years since blogging and citizen "i-reports" have been able to do what traditional journalism couldn't, which is to be immersed with the people on the scene and get a huge amount of information out quickly. IF you want to talk about bias, then we could argue that a vast majority of 'traditional' journalism (which u argue should be the sole beneficiary of freedom-of-the-press rights) is highly biased to a degree reaching misrepresentation (umm...fox news!). As log as the every day citizen realizes the source of his/her news, being a blog, or a network, or a newspaper, then he or she will be able to decipher the editorial subtext that the information has. But your preoccupation with the semantics of what it is to be a journalist, as if it were a country-club, is sad and pedantic. Freedom of the press is dependent on the struggle towards freedom of information...and to me if 1 aids in giving the people the latter, then they should be covered by the former's umbrella. If journalism, as an art, will not change, then it will die.
#5 Posted by Yara, CJR on Thu 3 Mar 2011 at 01:43 PM
Get off your high horse Sir!
Watching you on ONTV, reminded me of the time you were teary eyed because Elqaeda said that you are a CIA informant. Now, you wanna put blogger down?! Where were you when they were tortured by Moubarak's attack-dogs?!
#6 Posted by A Fariss, CJR on Thu 24 Mar 2011 at 09:00 AM