With an infinite flow of information online and via satellite, it becomes increasingly difficult for print media to compete. In the face of declining readership and soaring printing costs, publications need to find creative ways to withstand the challenge. As we go beyond the celebration of our 15th year, these are the new sorts of issues that Al-Ahram Weekly -- like other papers -- needs to tackle Playing games with the truth Gamal Nkrumah* looks back on 15 years of working for a paper that sees Egypt as an integral part of the South First impressions count. From the word go I realised that I was dealing with a mammoth bureaucratic entity -- the largest publishing house in Egypt, Africa and the Middle East. Not only that, but Al-Ahram was also closely associated with the state. Nonetheless, whatever the politics and testing red tape involved in those facts, wriggling free from the restrictions of the Western media establishment was invariably liberating. I soon carved a niche for myself. I was already ready -- politically speaking -- for a lurch to the left, and I found it in what I thought was the least probable place. My very first article for Al-Ahram Weekly -- an obituary -- set the scene for the kind of material that I would soon be publishing a lot more of. I had suggested writing the obituary of Sally Mugabe, the Zimbabwean president's first and now revered wife, and the powers-that-be at the Weekly encouraged me to do so. Sally Mugabe's life inspired hope and pride in being African -- she embodied the pains, sacrifice and spiritual redemption of the national liberation struggle. For me personally, what I found especially refreshing was that a fledgling Egyptian paper was interested in paying tribute to an African female freedom fighter. Indeed, I was soon encouraged to develop the concept of a regular page, called South, that featured the challenges and aspirations of the peoples of the developing countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America. I felt instantly at home -- I had carved a niche and it was one with a mission that I strongly believed in. Hosny Guindy, the Weekly 's first editor-in-chief, was very encouraging. I could not have gone ahead and commissioned someone like Mumia Abu Jamal, a Black Panther, to write for us without his guidance and support. As a member of the Mumia Abu Jamal International Tribunal, I had visited the iconic figure when he was on death row in Pennsylvania. I had also asked him to write for us, and he had readily obliged. There was no way in which Mumia Abu Jamal, a fully accredited African-American journalist, would have been published in a mainstream American paper. He was, however, welcomed in an Egyptian state-affiliated paper, even while Egypt was a close ally of the US and the second biggest recipient of American aid in the world after Israel. This may appear odd, unless you take into consideration the fact that we, at Al-Ahram Weekly, were given considerable leeway, and we certainly always did our best to push the ceiling accordingly. In this respect, Al-Ahram Weekly was a trendsetter in many ways. It was the first paper, for instance, to conduct a poll on normalisation with Israel. It also spearheaded the push for greater disclosure and exposure of issues pertaining to the South. In the midst of all this, I put pen to paper. Interviewing leaders of African and Asian countries was a pleasurable pastime. Colourful leaders like Libya's Muammar Gaddafi and South Africa's Mandela, more sober ones like Ethiopia's Meles Zennawi and Namibia's Sam Nujoma, and a host of Sudanese political figures, mostly opposition, and Asian leaders like Sri Lanka's Kumaratunga and her mother the late Bandaranaike, one of the founders of the Non-Aligned Movement and Indonesia's Megawati Sukarnoputri. And, last but not least three of the founding fathers of the Organisation of African Unity -- Tanzania's Julius Nyerere, Zambia's Kenneth Kaunda and Algeria's Ahmed Ben-Bella. The quest for promoting African affairs in the Egyptian media also took me to many OAU and African Union summits. Equally thrilling was that I had the pleasure of commissioning articles by such luminaries as Eqbal Ahmad and Noam Chomsky -- and I learnt a great deal from their humility and generosity of spirit. They were interested in South issues. By the same token, meeting the deadlines was always a pain -- there is, after all, always a trade off between quality and speed. We also had to learn how far transparency, exposure and disclosure go. For me, the greatest pleasure I derived from writing for Al-Ahram Weekly was that I could say what I really wanted to say about African politics, which I felt for with a passion. Development issues, too, were uppermost in my mind. I could never do that in London in a mainstream paper. As such, my journalistic experience had been restricted to a handful of London-based African monthly and weekly magazines. Who says there is objectivity in the Western media? There is self-censorship, and anyone who doesn't know that would be kidding themselves. In the West there are many ways to silence unwelcome views, and these are systematically deployed, and have especially been in the aftermath of 11 September and the subsequent United States-led war on terror. Western nations are most certainly adopting "third world" tactics when it comes to media mind control as never before. Journalists in the West need to seduce the reader into forgetting that their articles are not in the least objective. This might sound like a gross generalisation, but in many cases it is true. The curse of censorship and self- censorship is by no means restricted to developing countries in Africa and Asia. With the Weekly, a strange dichotomy arose. Although published in the midst of a restricted media environment, material that would have been way too risqué in the West found a home here. And with the Internet, it became readily available to Western readers as well. When I wrote "The giant's feet of clay" in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 -- arguing that the crows had come home to roost -- hate mail was hurled at me, invariably from those I imagined were rednecks from America's Bible Belt. Soon enough, the attitudes of Westerners towards Arabs and Muslims appeared to harden even more. Here at the Weekly we began closely monitoring Western official views and public opinion as reflected in the Western media. It quickly became clear that only the South sympathised with the Arab and Muslim cause. At the same time, however, the South was taken for granted even more than it had been before. The relationship between the West and the rest of the world was fast changing. Soon enough, we here at the Weekly even decided to drop the label "South" altogether, replacing it with the more appropriate designation "International". It was now primarily a case of America and the rest of us. Which made our job even trickier. * The writer is assistant editor-in-chief of Al-Ahram Weekly
