That’s how it went.
The editorial staff back home called my Sudan trip a tremendous start to my career. But, as I made my way back to Cairo, I was overburdened with confusing, new impressions. I’d always considered refugees to be, well, victims. But the biggest problems that MSF was facing were thuggery and theft. Camp residents stole from the relief workers and from each other, fought vendettas, and sabotaged the food handouts unless they received preferential treatment ... Beforehand, I’d never have imagined this happening; but when the camp coordinator told me about it, I thought, what did you expect? It was the same with the Sudanese officials and bureaucrats. I’d assumed that they wanted to put an end to the misery; but, in Africa’s poorest country, things didn’t work that way. Local officials knew that Western aid organizations had to deliver the goods they’d promised and that individual aid workers” careers would be on the line if food didn’t reach the right people at the right time. So the officials blackmailed the aid workers—a thousand-dollar clearance fee would be demanded for the distribution of a food consignment to the south; no payment, and the food would be left to rot in the harbor.
In Cairo I slept for twenty-four hours, unpacked a few boxes, and then it was Monday morning. I sat down at my desk, lined up my “Middle East Correspondent” business cards, checked that my fax, phone, computer, and Internet were connected, and spotted a fatal flaw. What if a Western tourist was kidnapped in Yemen, a spiritual leader was blown up in Lebanon, Baghdad’s regime staged angry demonstrations, or a fundamentalist group was rounded up in the south of my very own Egypt? ... How would I know about it? You might tell me to switch on the news. But I was the news now.
It turned out to work like this: All the newspaper, radio, and television offices subscribe to news agencies such as Reuters, Agence France Presse (AFP), Associated Press (AP), and their more lightweight competitors. These news agencies send reporters to important events and also have tipsters on the payroll, even in the furthest corners of the world. When one of these reporters or tipsters from say, Reuters, comes across something newsworthy, he calls his line manager. The line manager consults his bosses; and if they give the green light, reporters and photographers go off on the chase. Their photos and information are sent to the local capital or to London, where they are turned into a newsflash that is forwarded as quickly as possible to thousands of editors all over the world. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week—press conferences, funerals, world records, shootings, election results, medical wonders, earthquakes, amazing rescue operations, unexpected snowfall, border incidents ...
The news agencies are the eyes and ears of the world and, in the industry, their flood of information is called the “news stream” or simply “the agencies” or “the wires.” It would go like this: “Hilversum studios here. The wires say that some fundamentalists have been picked up in your area. Do you know anything else about it?” In the beginning I sometimes wanted to exclaim, “How do you expect me to know anything else about it when the local media sits on news for days on end?” It was, of course, a standard question, but the implication verged on humiliating: If, in Hilversum, they had faster and better access to what was happening in my area than I did, where did that leave me?
Presenting was the primary task of every correspondent, as I discovered a month and a half later when the Middle East really dominated world news for a while. Saddam Hussein was still in power in Iraq and had expelled the UN weapons inspectors from his country. The U.S. was insisting that he let them back in, and was threatening him with bombardment.
An ultimatum was set, and journalists hurried to neighboring Jordan, where the only still-functioning Iraqi embassy was situated. I was reunited with the journalists I’d gotten to know in Sudan, but there were too many new faces for it to be an intimate reunion. The fact was, because America bombing Iraq was more newsworthy than America bombing Sudan, reporters had flown in from all over the world. The week before they’d reported on riots in Asia, and after this they’d move on to Africa. It made for some interesting scenes in the five-star hotels in Amman. You had the diplomats and Western businessmen who’d been working in Iraq and had all raced from Baghdad to Amman in their four-wheel drives, and you had the journalists who’d raced to Amman to tear off in four-wheel drives to Baghdad. Apparently there were also Iraqi secret agents in the five-star hotels, trying to keep a record of who the expats were talking to.
It was as cosy as could be with all those war correspondents, and practical problems dominated our conversations. We huddled up with contacts, spoke stealthily into our phones, tried to wheedle other people’s gambits out of them after much beer, or begged the BBC for help—there was a rumor going round that they had a functionary at the Iraqi Ministry of Information on their payroll and could get visas. This was what everything revolved around, and for me, too—getting a visa. What a humiliating nightmare. You filled in a form and you went twice a day to the Iraqi embassy to listen to Consul Sadun, sitting under a large poster of Saddam Hussein, the Anointed, the Glorious, read out the names of the lucky few. We jostled Sadun like children clustering around a dubious-looking man with candy and, on the final evening before the ultimatum was levied, I saw grown men in tears by the embassy gates when they discovered they’d be reduced to peering through the fence. Perhaps it was some consolation to them that, shortly afterwards, all the stress gave Sadun a heart attack. Some news organizations sent fruit baskets.
Back in our hotel, everyone was drinking. “Arafat! Yes, Arafat. That time when Clinton came to Gaza—Oh, with that bloke with the tip-top homemade whisky—I even interviewed him—Who, Arafat?!—Yes, but I’m not telling you how I swung that one.” Lost for words, I drank along with them, if only because the alcohol helped me forget that I didn’t have a visa stamp in my passport either, and I’d have to “do” the war from my hotel room in Amman.
The bombings began, and a wave of suppressed relief swept over the correspondents, particularly the freelancers. Saddam could have given in at the last minute, and then there wouldn’t have been any bombings. No bombings would have meant no work, after money had already been spent on coming to Amman.
The news agencies’ reports over the first bomb strikes came in, and Dutch Radio 1 News began a continuous broadcast. But what was there to report? It wasn’t yet possible to determine whether all of the targets had been hit. The fact that the U.S. Air Force said it was all going according to plan, and that the victims of the bombing were angry, was par for the course; I could only report that a couple of times. But what else? I couldn’t even leave the hotel. Not only was it the middle of the night, but the sound quality afforded by the Jordanian telephone company was too poor to do a cross-talk with the radio mobile.
What it came down to, I’m afraid, was me asking the room service waiter in our hotel, the Amman Intercontinental, what he thought of the bomb strikes. The man must have thought it was his big chance, as he said something like, “By Allah, this will just make the anger against America even greater.” Ten minutes later, there I was on the radio show, talking first about something I’d got from an agency press release faxed to me by the studio back home, and then about something from Al-Jazeera, which you can also get in the Netherlands, and finally about what ordinary Arabs were thinking. At which I adopted my expert’s voice and said, “It’s difficult to judge, but you do hear people say that this is playing into the hands of the fundamentalists. At any rate, they stand to gain the most from the increasing anger against America that these bombing raids will lead to.”
The White House called the bombings “Operation Desert Fox”; little by little, I realized why. News is also a kind of show business. That’s why I was in Amman summarizing press releases from Hilversum on the Baghdad bombings, instead of the person receiving the wires in the Hilversum studios doing it. “From Amman” sounded better. I learned a new journalistic term: Dateline. That’s the place the article or report is made: “Our correspondent is in the Jordanian capital of Amman. Joris
, what’s the atmosphere like there?” And in the paper:
“Long live our beloved king!”
From our correspondent
AMMAN—This week could be the last time that Jordanians celebrate ...1
Editors-in-chief judged their correspondents and reporters by the dateline: If you had “it” and if you were “there”—that’s to say, if you hadn’t missed anything major from the news agencies and you were there where the news was happening. “Nice analysis, shame about the dateline.” That’s why those grown men had cried at the gates of the Iraqi embassy in Amman. Of course, if they’d been in Baghdad, they’d have been immediately confined to their rooms and condemned to using the same news agencies as I was in Amman (that’s if the fax machines worked); but there, at least, they would have “scored.”
That first night, the radio had broadcast hours and hours of coverage, with a contribution from me practically every hour (“the anger is still growing”). Afterwards, a friend asked me how I’d managed to answer all the questions during those cross-talks, every hour and without hesitation. When I told him that, like on the TV news, you knew all the questions in advance, his emailed response came packed with expletives. My friend had realized that, for decades, what he’d been watching and listening to on the news was pure theatre.
I’d been both surprised and flattered when the Volkskrant newspaper and the radio station had offered me correspondent’s posts. Despite my lack of journalistic experience or knowledge of the politics of the region, I’d wanted to believe that it was a simple case of them having faith in me. But the real reason was less flattering—the basic task of being a correspondent is not that difficult. The editors in the Netherlands called when something happened, they faxed or emailed the press releases, and I’d retell them in my own words on the radio, or rework them into an article for the newspaper. This was the reason my editors found it more important that I could be reached in the place itself than that I knew what was going on. The news agencies provided enough information for you to be able to write or talk your way through any crisis or summit meeting.
It required some getting used to, and the notion I’d had of journalism, news, and the media took its first knock. I’d imagined correspondents to be historians-of-the-moment. When something important happened, they’d go after it, find out what was going on, and report on it. But I didn’t go off to find out what was going on; that had been done long before. I went along to present an on-the-spot report. I never would have suspected it beforehand, but it was logical—every day there are thousands of press conferences, summits, funerals, demonstrations, attacks, and riots. How could the editorial teams have an overview of all of this? And besides, there are several thousand news teams worldwide; imagine if they all attended a press conference or a funeral...
A little while later, on my first flying visit to the Netherlands for a meeting with the editorial team, I understood why my bosses allowed themselves to be blindly led by the news agencies and laid such emphasis on “being there” and “having it.” I’d thought of the World News department as knowledgeable men and women commanding a view of the world and, after serious consideration, deciding which things would be news. The people on the team were indeed knowledgeable, but they didn’t oversee the world. They oversaw the news agencies, and the boss, or “chief” in the lingo, made a selection from what they had. Or, more correctly, he made a selection from the agencies’ own selection because they had already categorized everything according to how important they found it—“breaking news,” “urgent news,” and “update.”
Once again, I’d never have suspected this, but when I saw it I realized it couldn’t work any other way. The foreign editor had no firsthand experience of the Arab world; he worked under great time pressure, had to cover the whole world, and had the editor-in-chief breathing down his neck. The latter knew even less about the Arab world and had to keep an eye on all of the departments (Home, Sport, Economy, Art...), as well as dealing with an expanding load of management tasks. What could the chief and editor-in-chief do but look at the news agencies and their direct competition and ask, “Why don’t we have this?” That’s why you often come across the same images and stories if you leaf through a few different newspapers or click the news channels. All the editors get their information and film coverage from the same sources. That’s also why the people who translate and rework the press releases don’t tend to call themselves journalists but “editors.” They don’t travel themselves, but simply pass on messages or have them reworked by correspondents.
Luckily, the correspondent’s job involved more than just presenting news: Analysis and reportage were also expected. But how could I get this without having to rely on room service waiters? Other correspondents introduced me to specialist magazines and websites on the Middle East, and publications by the UN, the IMF, and various think tanks. Each Arab country had its UN diplomats, and local experts and human rights activists, who’d talk to journalists. You’d ask them about a particular issue and work their remarks into an article: “According to Ra’s Mutakallim, Professor of Politics at Cairo University, ‘People don’t seem to realize that many Arabs are not against America but against specific American policy.’” These kinds of people were called “talking heads,” and my fellow correspondents had lists of them and their phone numbers. You could also hire a fixer, a local who would arrange meetings for you and interpret if necessary, at a cost of between one hundred and two hundred dollars a day.
My peers helped me with my first analyzes, and I looked to them for my first pieces of reporting. Most useful were their lists of ready-made stories: “Have you already done a piece on ... drug abuse in the Yemen / honour killings in Jordan / the personality cult of the Syrian president / AIDS awareness in Egypt? Call me tomorrow—I’ve got all the contacts.”
There was also a databank called Lexis Nexis, where you could buy articles from almost every big Western newspaper from recent years. This was a goldmine of ideas and background information, and in practice it went like this: On Reuters or in the New York Times, I would read about a UN report on the underage orphans who were collecting the rubbish for 22 million inhabitants in Cairo. Then I’d have Lexis Nexis mail me twenty articles about the rubbish collectors, and I’d mine these for relevant facts and figures—the number of children, the illnesses and fatalities caused by poisonous fumes, the estimated costs of alternative waste-collection solutions. Next, I’d jot down the names of the UN workers and other spokesmen quoted, get their phone numbers from other journalists or the Internet, and give them a call. The times I waited a few days before doing the footwork I’d find that other correspondents were ahead of me in the same game, and by then the functionaries would have seen so many of us they could recite their perfect quotes in their sleep. Finally, for the human angle, I’d go to the rubbish dump and find a child who’d say he’d rather play outside but had to eat—a boy proud to be earning money instead of spending his days in a packed, roasting classroom being hit by his teacher and not being able to keep up because he was half illiterate.
Before I went to Cairo, I’d joked to friends that if the army’s motto was “see the world, meet interesting people, and kill them,” the correspondent’s battle cry should be “see the world, meet interesting people, and write about them.” But when the weeks turned to months and I came to understood what the job consisted of, that joke slipped from my repertoire. See the world ... through an airplane or taxi window perhaps, but what I mostly saw were embassies, departure halls, hotel rooms, and offices. There was waiting, lots of waiting—until the delayed flight left, until the bus came, until my call was returned as promised, or should I call again myself? Was that impolite? Or was I naive to think they’d return a call from a journalist from a country they couldn’t even locate on the map? Should I wait until the consul saw fit to see me, or had he gone home without saying anything?
My bosses back home in the Netherlands didn’t seem to understand that ministries of informati
on, travel agencies, and embassies in the Arab world were different from those in the West. If I went with my bags to collect my ticket as prearranged, the travel agency might have closed in the middle of the day for no apparent reason; the ticket just wouldn’t be there, or it would show the wrong destination or the wrong return date. The passport photographer on the corner of my street became my best friend, or at least I became his, and soon I’d written down my passport information so many times I knew it off by heart. Sometimes I felt more like a Boy Scout than a correspondent.
And then there were the interesting people I was supposed to report on ... I met people who were undeniably fascinating, such as Hassan Nasrallah, the secretary-general of Hezbollah in Lebanon. Only fifteen years previously, his kindred spirits were abducting journalists like me and cutting their throats if they felt like it. Nasrallah’s precursor, together with his wife and son, had been killed by Israel, and he can expect the same fate. But, as it turned out, an interview with an interesting person didn’t necessarily make for an interesting interview.
I flew to Beirut and learned from the Ministry of Information that Hezbollah had its own PR department. I could come along at once, they told me over the phone. Their headquarters were in the Haret Hreik quarter in the south of the city—“Any taxi driver will know where it is.” All I had to do was to go to the end of the street, turn left under the AMERICA IS ABSOLUTE EVIL banner, take an immediate right, and there they were, occupying two simple floors above a lingerie shop—although that last bit wasn’t included in the route description. I was introduced to PR officer Hussein Nabulsi, who, after having spent a few years in New York, spoke better English than I did. Which paper did I work for? Could the paper send a faxed confirmation, together with its circulation figures and a statement of its political persuasion? Would the embassy be able to confirm these things? Hezbollah demanded that the interview be done in a question-and-answer format, meaning it couldn’t be an article in which several people were quoted along with Nasrallah, and this also required faxed confirmation. I called the editorial staff, begged the embassy for a reference, and called Nabulsi back to say that the Dutch didn’t do that kind of thing (“But the Danes do!” they countered).
People Like Us: Misrepresenting The Middle East Page 2