This is the text of the speech held by the author at the Doha International Conference, organised in Qatar by Reset Dialogues on Civilizations on February 26th 2008.
A very painful conclusion I have reached is that the audiences are watching media that reconfirm their ideologies and journalists often address the audience of their channel because it is very difficult to reach other audiences, as I can assume also through my work in Al Jazeera International. Even when the audience decides to watch different channels they do it in order to reconfirm their perception of the world, as it happened in the case of the Lebanon war, or as it is happening in these days with the American primaries: the Arab public is following the Obama/Clinton campaign in order to understand which one of the candidates will be able to serve best our interests in the next future.
The global scene has become more complex and complicated, and so working as a journalist. Because of this complexity, we, as journalists, tend to simplify things, even for in the newsrooms we try to understand things and make them easier in order to present them to the public. The Lebanon war, the Palestinian issue are very complex topics and using stereotypes is a shortcut to simplify things. Journalists are to blame for that, but so are also academics and politicians. After 9/11 there is a kind of “mind for emergency”: big events and catastrophes produces adrenaline shots inside the newsrooms and that makes it more difficult to manage a balanced information, also because of the strong competition amongst the main global media that all want to show off their muscles: even though we are not convinced, we try to interview some people because we want to show our balance or we send correspondents where they are not needed. In my life in Al Jazeera I have never felt I was not free. Our society is very transparent. I resigned twice, I worked for BBC International and, even though three years ago I strongly criticized Al Jazeera in a public conference saying that its reporting didn’t quite enforce the principles of democracy, I am now a deputy editor of the English channel.
As I said, it is difficult for the media to feed the news despite stereotypes. We must be selective though because there are thousands of news coming in at any time, and we are focusing more on bad news than on good news because those are more representative of changes and are an intrinsic part of reality. When I am asked why Al Jazeera tells more stories about the deaths of Palestinians rather than those of Israelis, or why it shows images of the Palestinian houses being demolished, my answer is simple: we do that because there are more Palestinian deaths and because it is their houses that are being demolished. As I said once to Peres, “stop the demolition and we will stop talking about it”. What is our task, as journalist? Should we facilitate the change keeping an impartial stand, or should we actively contribute to dialogue as protagonists? If, as I believe, our role is to communicate beyond East and West, we should manage to create a new audience and fight against stereotypes.
Ibrahim Helal is Deputy Managing Director of Al Jazeera International.