{"id":584,"date":"2010-11-01T10:22:35","date_gmt":"2010-11-01T06:22:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/?p=584"},"modified":"2010-11-06T12:34:58","modified_gmt":"2010-11-06T08:34:58","slug":"western-media-and-the-arab-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/middle-east-business\/middle-east-media-analysis\/western-media-and-the-arab-world\/","title":{"rendered":"‘If it bleeds, it leads’. Agendas, bias, ‘poppycutting’"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I remember as a teenager watching a Chilean writer describe his appalling experience in jail.\u00a0 He had been a political dissident and opponent of the military dictatorship of General Pinochet which had usurped the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in a bloody coup.<\/p>\n

Of all the brutality that was visited upon him by his torturers one particular experience stood out for me.\u00a0 At certain times he would no longer be struck in the face or be beaten with steel rods on the back of the hand.\u00a0 Instead he would be wrapped tight in a blanket and was then pummeled about the body with rubber hoses.\u00a0 When this happened, in spite of the wretched pain being visited upon him, his spirits rose as he knew the visit of an outside agency was imminent. \u00a0 The rubber hose treatment ensured that his tormentors continued to inflict substantial pain but without leaving visible marks on the skin.<\/p>\n

What impressed me about this, apart from the victim\u2019s enormous fortitude and apparent lack of bitterness, was the imagination of the human mind. \u00a0 Someone at some stage in history had been faced with the problem of inflicting maximum pain on another individual but without leaving apparent evidence.\u00a0 It had perhaps troubled them and their confederates for quite some time until that \u2018Eureka moment\u2019 struck. Then the first ever successful application of blanket, rubber hose and insufferable pain (but\u00a0 \u2018look \u2013 no marks\u2019) took place. Oh what a happy beating that must have been!<\/p>\n

These thoughts have returned again as I\u2019ve watched the controversy surrounding a recent court case in the UAE being played out. \u00a0 The facts as reported by The National were as follows:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe federal court ruling involved an appeal by a man who had slapped and kicked his adult daughter, and slapped his wife. While the court upheld an earlier guilty verdict from the Sharjah Court of First Instance, the judge also acknowledged a controversial interpretation of Shariah law regarding a husband’s right to discipline his wife and children by mandating that he may not leave a mark.\u201d<\/p>\n

There has, not surprisingly, been a storm of protest following the reports and the authorities have been swift to respond. According to the state news agency WAM, Humaid al-Muhairi, director of the Justice Ministry\u2019s judicial inspection department said:\u00a0 “Our courts adhere to (a) strict policy not to tolerate any degree of family violence, whether verbal or physical.”<\/p>\n

Having worked with one of the agencies that provides shelter, accommodation and advice to women who face domestic abuse in the UAE I know first-hand that this is an issue which the authorities here do take seriously. \u00a0 While instances of domestic abuse are to be found in every single country on the planet the problem in this particular instance is that the story hits key chords with a Western audience.\u00a0 \u2018When did you stop beating your wife?\u2019 is the oft-quoted ultimate unanswerable question in Western schools of journalism.<\/p>\n

Newsrooms around the Western world are primed for stories that play to a pre-cooked interpretation of the Arab world which include the phrases\/words \u2018mismanaged wealth\u2019, \u2018abuse of women\u2019, \u2018censorship\u2019 and, of course, \u2018terrorism\u2019. \u00a0 If a particular story includes one or more of those elements it\u2019s generally headed for a prominent place on the newspages of any major Western publication.\u00a0 So why does the Western media appear to take an unrelentingly negative view of much of what happens in the Arab World?<\/p>\n

Clearly there are particular agendas at play where specific owners or proprietors of a media group have an anti-Arab bias. \u2018The Poppycutter Syndrome\u2019 explains much of what has happened to Dubai over the past\u00a0 – build \u2018em up (Burj, Palm, celebrities) then cut \u2018em down (property crash, fleeing expats, misbehaving celebrities).\u00a0 Once the poppy\u2019s been reduced to a tiny stalk it\u2019ll be allowed to grow again. Don\u2019t be surprised to see a spate of \u2018Dubai\u2019s not so bad after all\u2019 stories beginning to crop up in the UK media over the next six months or so.<\/p>\n

Remember, you heard it here first.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The UAE finds itself in the international spotlight again – and for all of the wrong reasons. So why do the Western media ‘accentuate the negative’ and forget the positive when reporting events in the Arab world? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":594,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[82,44,89,81,65],"tags":[197,18280,104,162,18337,2116,95],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/584"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=584"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/584\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/594"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=584"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=584"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=584"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}