Outside the Australian media fishbowl

Step outside the Australian media fishbowl, and suddenly there’s a whole other world.

Dubai is in a big hurry to grow up. Popular theory has it that the oil will run out one day, so the United Arab Emirates has embraced large-scale construction projects as if life literally depended on it. Construction cranes fill the horizon as you speed down the city’s main highway – I lost count beyond 30 during a quick scan at one point.

Dubai famously has the Burj Al Arab (apparently the world’s only 7 star hotel and one that’s built entirely on reclaimed land), and now the Burj Dubai (apparently the world’s tallest building).

(Ahem, excuse the fancy dress, but it’s what you do after the camel rides on Desert Safari, we were told…)

And speaking of reclaimed land, Dubai’s government owned construction company Nakheel is busy creating new communities to live and work on such as The Palm, and The World. Both are new reclaimed land masses visible from space.

And during my visit to the city for a week earlier this month to see my brother and his family, it was good to see that the local media is also maturing. The city’s newspaper editors recently signed a code of ethics.

But it’s hard to ignore the backdrop, or what you might like to call the proverbial camel in the room. One one hand, Dubai is bent on embracing and even exceeding the West’s thirst for material success and consumption. On the other, the culture and administrative leaders remain loyal to the UAE’s Islamic and Arab traditions. On one of the days I was in town, the local Gulf News proclaimed across page one “UAE upholds press freedom.”

As a media junkie who loves studying local press while traveling abroad, my first reaction was to question why such a story would make the lead story on page one. A quiet news day perhaps? A closer inspection reveals the power dynamics at play in Dubai:

In a victory for freedom of the press in the UAE, His Highness Shaikh Mohammad Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice-President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, yesterday issued instructions that journalists in the country will not be jailed for doing their work.

It’s worth noting the positive overtones - this was positioned as a victory for the local press. You get the sense that the UAE media is doing its best to be polite. Unlike the general distain with which most Australian’s regard their leaders, it appears any written reference to Shaikh Mohammad Bin Rashid Al Maktoum is positive. Disrespecting your ruler is just not done. (Aside from the fact everyone I spoke to said good things about the Shaikh anyway.) But when you keep reading the article in question its raises some questions.

Shaikh Abdullah said Shaikh Mohammad issued instructions that no journalist is to be jailed for reasons related to his work, adding that there are other measures that may be taken against journalists who break the press and publication law, but not jail, WAM reported.

“Other measures?” You won’t go to jail, but there are other measures!

On the upside, Reporters Sans Frontieres says the situation in the UAE and other countries in the Arab world such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar. But if you are journalist in Jordan, Djibouti, Egypt, Palestine, Somalia and Morocco, it’s getting much harder to work with freedom.

Meanwhile, the situation could not be more different over in Uganda’s capital city Kampala.

While yours truly, Mrs J, and the team we were traveling with set about building a large kitchen for an orphans and widows at a mission run by Kampala Pentecostal Church called Watoto (of the Watoto Children’s Choir fame), the country’s journalists were busy taking advantage of hard-won freedoms to attack its leaders and the general malaise that affects Africa.

October 9, 2007 was the day Uganda celebrated 45 years of independence from British colonial rule. That day I bought a copy of the Daily Monitor (which bears the slogan “Truth Every Day” - and comparisons to Sydney’s Daily Telegraph are not unfair…). This paper used its editorial to proudly champion the media’s freedom and simultaneously attack the institutional corruption that continues to sabotage Uganda’s development. One gentleman, Nicholas Sengoba, wrote in a separate opinion piece that:

Sad to say, good old Africa is led by raw thieves in suits (and military fatigues) and people led by thieves throughout history rarely cut respectable figures (sic). They will fight wars, kill, manipulate the law, steal elections, bribe and suppress the opposition, muzzle the media, stuff all levels and spheres of influence relying on tribalism and nepotism as a basis of recruitment, all for the sale of perpetuity and self preservation to safeguard the looting.

It appears greed still trumps good governance and leadership. I’ve since noticed this theme was continued on the paper’s website on Oct 29. One Muniini K. Mulera writes:

…one gets the sense that the president [Yoweri Museveni], busy congratulating himself and living off his past exploits, does not get it. He doesn’t seem to see that things are once again falling apart in the land, and that the centre may not hold because of the very reasons why the great infrastructure that Sir Andrew Cohen [former British Governor of Uganda, 1952-57] bequeathed to us suffered a terrible fate hardly 15 years after his retirement.

Other copies of this paper, and others like The New Vision, are full of stories and articles with similar levels of vitriol and expressions of desire for change. And it wasn’t hard to believe them, either. Just weeks before Kampala was due to host CHOGM (November 20-23), the roads we traveled on were still full of potholes, new hotels still didn’t have facades attached, and the airport was still undergoing major reconstruction. The billboards said Uganda was ready for CHOGM, but the locals were telling us that after four years of planning the reality was quite different!

But for all of Uganda’s expression of press freedom, you have to also question what appears to be some selective re-writing of history. In this case, special liftout reports published in the Daily Monitor and The New Vision carried details of all of the political turmoil that has plagued the country for 45 years. But with one notable exception. The Ugandan government has been engaged in an horrific, bloody, and costly civil war against the Lord’s Resistance Army and its leader Joseph Kony, since 1986.

One report in the Daily Monitor said the war had cost the government more than US$1.7 billion during this time (I can’t imagine how many people would be alive in Uganda right now if that money went to health care and other basic services). Kony is a man who until recently was forcibly enlisting child soldiers to kill members of their own family and systematically terrorise the people of northern Uganda. And it’s a story of genocide that is still largely overlooked by the international community. So in that context, you can understand my surprise at why notable dates and events related to the LRA war were omitted from these anniversary reports. Was this bad news simply too bad to be included? Your guess is as good as mine.

Skip forward to October 21 and the Jones family touched back down in Sydney, only to be greeted by the local press obsessed with the federal election. And rightly so, mind you.But one myth that was shattered for me during this trip was that Australia was somehow less prone to intense naval gazing than other countries like the USA, or in this case Uganda and the UAE. We all know local media matters. But sometimes it can be a case of local matters overwhelming local media.