A Quote by Ethan Zuckerman
The U.S. media have done a shameful job of reporting on the Arab world.
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So for me, you can't control the media, you have to work with media to get your message out there and you just hope that there's enough good honest reporting and people in the media that can get that job done.
Recall that the United Nations commissioned Arab scholars and analysts to publish the Arab Human Development Report. What causes the backwardness, the scholars wondered, of 22 Arab states, covering nearly 300 million people? Their conclusion? Of all world regions, the Arab countries scored the lowest in freedom, media independence, civil liberties, political process and political rights.
The Arab world needs a modern version of the old transnational media so citizens can be informed about global events. More important, we need to provide a platform for Arab voices.
I don't think journalism changes. It's about digging into stories and telling them well. The basic tenets of great reporting stay the same while things around it change. Technology has made reporting easier, but it has also caused job loss. Social media has increased discussion around topics, but it has its own challenges at times.
Media bias in editorials and columns is one thing. Media fraud in reporting 'facts' in news stories is something else. ...The issue is not what various journalists or news organizations' editorial views are. The issue is the transformation of news reporting into ideological spin, along with self-serving taboos and outright fraud.
In many parts of the world, including the Arab world, the Latin American world, and even parts of the Western world, there is a tradition of writers being quite engaged. Particularly in the Arab world you have had very, very strong traditions of literature and poetry and most of the writers have been deeply committed to the cause of the Arab nation.
I think, in terms of the media, journalists need to do a much better job of asking people they interview about conflicts of interest and then reporting them.
While there are several challenges, I do believe that over the transition and into the Trump presidency, the media as a whole has done pretty good work, as opposed to a spottier record during the campaign. There has been a lot of shoe-leather reporting going on, and the great story thus far of the Trump White House is the willingness of people who work there to leak to the media.
The Supreme Court has held that code is speech. And it doesn't matter that it's done on a computer or done face to face or done in a newspaper, reporting the facts of the world is protected speech.
In 1996, Al Jazeera was the first TV station in the Arab world to allow Israelis to appear on the screen and express their views and address the Arab world. Before that, Arab broadcasters did not allow what was perceived as the enemy to appear on the screen.
Media has changed dramatically, as you and I know. We're in a world now where you're rewarded for being outrageous. Punditry has replaced reporting as the gold standard of journalism.
More attention should be given to the Arab world and the human rights abuse that is taking place every day in many countries in the Arab world.
The Arab Spring is kind of a perfect model for how people are going to use technology to act collectively in their own interest in the future. There's never been a revolution that was coordinated by social media to the degree that the Arab Spring was.
I'm one of the luckiest Arab actors on the planet, because I've done, I think, two of the finest Arab roles that have been out in mainstream cinema for a very long time.
We tie ourselves in knots when we act as if democracy is good for the United States and Israel but not for the Arab world. For far too long, we've treated the Arab world as just an oil field.
Mr. Trump understands that attacking the media is the reddest of meat for his base, which has been conditioned to reject reporting from news sites outside of the conservative media ecosystem.
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