Sunday, October 02, 2005

Whenever I hear Arab journalists (as I did on Hiwar Maftuh hosted by the highly talented Ghassan Bin Jiddu on Al-Jazeera) talk about "press objectivity" and about "journalistic professionalism" I squirm. People who talk like that belong to two groups: 1) those who invoke those words, as they do in the West, to disguise--not to eliminate--the clear political and corporate biases of their endeavors; 2) those who really are sincere but who know very little about the Western press, and who are under the false impression that there is such thing as "objectivity" and "professionalism." What we have here is best summed up by my favorite slogan "fair and balanced." I of course am neither fair nor balanced, and damn proud of it. Do you have a problem with that? Everybody in the Arab press should read the book Media Monopoly by Ben Bagdikian.