In the Middle East and beyond, it was the week that Arabic satellite TV network al-Jazeera began broadcasting in English. In Lebanon, it was the calm before yet another storm.
Six journalists from the Middle East and six from the United States sat down together at the American University in Beirut to look at how they cover the news and to try to understand how some of the world’s top stories look from the other side.
Co-sponsored by the Reuters Foundation and the U.S.-based Stanley Foundation, the course offered the participants a time-out to think, to question what they do and why and to swap their experiences of life as a journalist in their respective countries.
“I certainly do follow stories in the Middle East differently now,” Jim Kravets, a managing editor from California, commented after a few weeks back home. “My trust of the media (any single source of news) has eroded significantly.”
Reuters Foundation consultants Paul Iredale and Nick Phythian ran the course, which focused on news writing and news gathering, and was held for the first time in 2005.
A brief and bruising war triggered by the capture of two Israeli soldiers by Lebanon’s Hezbollah group had ended just three months before out arrival.
The 12 journalists – one Egyptian, one Iranian, two Lebanese, one Palestinian, one Syrian and six Americans – offered each other rare insights into reporting in their own countries.
Trips to Beirut’s battered southern suburbs and villages in the south where the Lebanese army and UN teams are clearing cluster bombs gave participants the chance to do some hands-on reporting. The Hezbollah political officer for southern Lebanon, Sheikh Hassan Ezz Eddine, was on hand in the southern suburbs to answer their questions.
Our speaker on the final day was Lebanese television presenter and talk show host Gisele Khoury, who interviews personalities on the al-Arabiya Arabic-language network and whose journalist husband was a leading member of the protest movement that grew into the political alliance that is running the country.
Samir Kassir, Gisele’s husband, was an organiser of the protests that forced Syria to pull its troops out of Lebanon after a truck bomb killed former prime minister Rafik al-Hariri in early 2005. Samir was himself killed when a bomb exploded under his car outside his home several months later.
One week after our departure, Pierre Gemayel, a cabinet minister and a member of the same political movement, died in a hail of gunfire. His family and hundreds of thousands of his supporters took to the streets.
Leila Hatoum from Lebanon’s Daily Star newspaper told her fellow participants on the course in an email that the country they had just left was “a thin sheet of ice on top of a boiling volcano”. In the United States, the Bush administration was agonising over its next move in Iraq.
Once again, the Middle East was the top story in the world.
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