Getting Good News in the Arab World

When major decisions reflecting policy changes in America are made, coverage is global. You can choose between any of the four major networks, any number of news channels, or pick up one of the thousands of newspapers that abound in the US either in print or online. Economic problems receive perhaps even more attention, as the current global crisis dominates news coverage.

Yet here in the Arab world, the quantity and quality of news coverage is remarkably lacking. I suppose this shouldn't be very surprising given the lack of political and social rights in general, but it's important to consider particularly because the amount if economic activity that occurs here and its relation to the West. A good example of this eerie silence is the growing crisis (or non-crisis) in Dubai.

After reading this article from the New York Times highlighting the potential crash that is hitting Dubai, I decided to look around and see what else was there. Of the various articles I read from the Huffington Post, Bloomberg, and NPR, I got a couple new pieces of information, but nothing that gave me any official government commentary or new hard facts of exactly how much has changed or what losses individual businesses have taken. NPR had a disputed quote from the chief of police regarding cars left at the airport, but that's it. How can such a potentially huge headline lack the hard facts to support it?

The reason is probably my greatest frustration with the Middle East: information, particularly bad news, is hidden and protected at almost all costs. Note the new fines for journalists reporting on the economic crisis for Dubai. Rather than fix the problem, simply pretend that it isn't there. Newspapers on the ground certainly don't help. In the last three years that I've been in the Middle East, I can count the number of critical newspaper articles with tangible facts that I've read or even heard about on one hand. Most newspapers have the same appearance in the Gulf: half a page of advertisements, generally for McDonalds, and then glossy pictures of the latest meetings that some dignitary or leader attended. In Cairo and Saudi Arabia, most people read only the Op-Ed section of the paper, which often created elaborate theories for why certain bad things were happening, and blaming said events on Israel, America, or any other country that tensions might currently exist with.

These rumors, which are also often repeated or recreated on News related talk shows on the Arabic Satellite News Channels, are often times more trusted then official reporting on events. This used to confuse and annoy me, but the reason for this is there is no credible source for information here. The BBC or some other Western News agency will do good work here sometimes, but its fleeting and never followed up on. Official sources won't comment, or worse, will blatantly distribute misinformation to kill a critical story. People have no choice but to fill in the gaps of information with their own creative theories as to how bad the crisis in Dubai is because nobody is talking about it.

The great irony of the culture of limited information here is that it completely undermines the credibility of these countries and cities, which will further exasperate any economic crisis. Instead of being a beacon of Arab and Western development that is surviving the global economic crisis, Dubai looks like a secretive and unstable country that is unsafe to invest in. There are probably very few people in the world who understand exactly what the economic climate in Dubai is like right now, but the best thing they could do for all parties right now is explain what is happening right now honestly so that it could be fixed in order to protect the massive development and progress that has already occurred in Dubai and the wider Gulf region.