CAIRO – Lawrence Pintak has the advantage of being both a distinguished communications academic and a practitioner, who has lived and worked in Cairo and had hands-on journalistic experience in the Middle East in the 1980s and 1990s, when arguably the launch of the Al-Jazeera news and information satellite channel in 1996 augured another kind of revolution in the region. The Arabic channel was joined by the English-language Al-Jazeera International in 2006, both acting as a thorn in the side of Arab dictators and essential viewing to know what was happening in the Middle East, including and especially the country you were living in. Widely and enthusiastically viewed throughout most of the world now, it has been a key player on the ground in relaying the continuing events of the Arab Spring, unless you live in the ‘land of the free,' where very few citizens and residents have the freedom of choice to watch Al-Jazeera, it being largely unavailable in the USA. While Al-Jazeera has a recurring role in Pintak's absorbing and revealing book The New Arab Journalist –Mission and Identity in a Time of Turmoil (AUC Press, 2011), through his own experience and numerous contacts he has also revealed much about Arab journalism and Arab journalists that otherwise may have remained untold – or at least undocumented. He has also reminded us of the Arab journalists who have been brutally murdered through courageously trying to fulfill their mission. For the chapter ‘Arab Journalists Look at Themselves and the Competition' Pintak surveyed Arab journalists whose “harsh view”, which was held by many on the state of their industry, was “underlined by the fact that they chose ‘professionalism' and a lack of ethics as the top challenges facing Arab journalism, along with press freedom issues and business pressures.” The survey carried out in 2006 “that is at the heart of this book” also demonstrated “the woefully poor salaries offered by most Arab news organisations”. It reflected “the vast gulf in income between the majority of working journalists in the Arab world and the elite, primarily employed by the pan-Arab satellite channels: 57 per cent of television journalists reported salaries of $2,500 per month or more; in contrast, 90 per cent of those earning less than $500 per month said that they worked in the print media”. The book was published shortly before the onset of the regional revolutions but the survey had presciently established that “Arab journalists at the dawn of the twenty-first century see their mission as driving political and social change in the Middle East and North Africa … [and] political reform, human rights, poverty, and education as the most important issues facing the region”. They also saw their own governments as the biggest obstacle to media independence. “Seventy per cent of respondents chose ‘government control' as the ‘most significant challenge' to Arab journalism, statistically tying with ‘lack of professionalism' when presented with a list of nine possible choices.” Lawrence Pintak's opening sentence in the chapter ‘Covering Darfur – A Question of Identity, states: “There was no story that better demonstrated the limits of freedom of information in the Arab media, or the degree to which ethnic, national, and religious identity shaped coverage, than the conflict in the Sudanese province of Darfur”. The chapter is also central to a repeated discussion in the book of perceptions of the role and identity of the Arab journalist. Pintak reports on two gatherings in the spring of 2007, which provided a window on the internal debate among Arab journalists struggling to rationalise their coverage of the conflict. One of the most telling comments made to Pintak during the often heated debates on the Arab coverage of Darfur was a quiet aside from an Egyptian journalist, who had been thwarted by his own editor in attempting to cover Darfur: “You need to know who you are working for,” the ‘who' not necessarily being as apparent as it might first seem. This was illustrated by the experience of Nabil Kassem, Al-Arabiya producer/director of Jihad on Horseback, “the Darfur documentary commissioned by Al-Arabiya's parent company MBC three years before, but killed after a phone call from Sudan's president to the then Saudi crown prince, who in turn called the owner of Al-Arabiya, who also happened to be King Fahd's brother-in-law”. The embittered Kassem referred to “fantasy” reports in the Arab media that Arab tribes were forced to flee attacking Africans and media claims that the existence of refugee camps was just Zionist propaganda. Kassem declared “he left his objectivity in the dust of the Darfur desert. ‘I am speaking as a humanitarian, not a journalist who is neutral,' he told the gathering. ‘How can anyone go and see millions of displaced people and remain balanced? Until now, I cannot forget what I saw. I left women and children there dying'.” Al-Arabiya, for whom Kassem still worked, later dramatically stepped up its coverage of the Darfur crisis and, although it had still not broadcast the documentary, it sold it to an international NGO, which made it available around the world. ‘Red Lines – The Boundaries of Journalistic Freedom' is essential reading and deals with the Arab media deep in the throes of change throughout the region. “It is a complex and often painful process, driven by regional rivalries, steeped in domestic political intrigue, and too often marred by physical violence.” The concluding chapter of the book is a ‘Postscript – New Media, New Media Models' in which Pintak refers to the growing influence of Arab bloggers and their varying stances and the distinctions between online journalists, bloggers and online activists with a political agenda. “By 2010, the Committee to Protect Journalists noted an overall increase in reporting on human rights issues in the Arab world, in large measure because of the impact of the Internet.” Pintak suggests that the next generation of Arab journalists may emerge, in part, from the bloggers' ranks. “In the meantime, the struggle of those striving to practice fair, factual and balanced journalism needed to be bolstered, not undermined by blurring the distinction between journalist and web activist as some Western journalist rights organisations were in danger of doing.” He concludes: “Professionalism was the Arab journalist's best defense” whose importance the journalists themselves had made clear in the survey.
