MEDIA: Numbered paragraphs on scandalous tapping ...

Far be it from me to revel in someone else's sorry. But seriously, the Murdoch press has caused sorrow to so many people that it's time to have a good laugh. So here goes.

[01] Here is an excellent summary and analysis of the line taken by that American newspaper that calls itself The Australian. .

[02] Here are some legalistic thoughts ...

It’s midnight. I’m sitting in front of the TV with two work colleagues. One is an experienced crown prosecutor who has run major jury trials in two common law countries and has over 3 decades advocacy experience. The second is a criminal defence lawyer who has practised in three Australian states. And then there is me, a humble civil and employment litigator.

We’d just finished washing our sides off the sofa after they were split by viewing The Naked Gun. We switched onto BBC. We’re watching history being made. And we can’t help but watch with our lawyer’s glasses on. Here are some of my colleagues’ responses.

“This poor old man is passing the buck,” says the former prosecutor. “He’s trying to dodge the question. It’s not working. It’s so obvious.”

“This bloke’s the client from hell. Fancy admitting you take tax issues seriously but not hacking phones,” says the defence lawyer.

“These are simple questions. Why is he taking so long to answer them? Is Rupert’s dementia natural or deliberate?” says the prosecutor again.

To say the least, the Murdochs were clearly unprepared. The MP’s on the Committee asked simple, direct and at best only mildly probing questions that would have sent Rumpole to sleep. One female MP asked a super-gentle question. James Murdoch thanked her and praised her question. My criminal defence colleague said: “The reason he’s thanking her is because she gave him a question he’s actually prepared for”.

Unlike the Murdochs, the MP’s were on top of the brief. They seemed to know more about News Corporation than the two men claiming to run the show. One interesting thing Mr ex-Prosecutor noted is that a number of the MP’s kept referring to Rupert as “Mr Murdoch” and James simply as “James”.

And I lost count of the number of times one MP called out words to this effect: “James, I will come to you later. My question is for Mr Murdoch.”

“Why is that young fella always butting in?” It wasn’t so much a question from the former prosecutor as an observation. James Murdoch seemed to play a Saif al-Islam type of role in selling and then defending his father’s regime to the world. But my learned colleagues were left with the impression that James was just a young upstart kid trying to protect his dad from the assassin’s bullets using a water pistol.

Here’s one you don’t have to have a practising certificate to understand. The CEO/Chairman and directors of a company like News Corp would have no knowledge of serious wrongdoing, if not serious criminal activity, is quite frankly unbelievable. Murdoch explained it away by telling us that News of the World represented a mere 1% of the entire organisation. So how big must a proportion of the empire be before criminal conduct is worthy of becoming a serious issue of corporate governance?

What shocked me as an employment lawyer was the complete absence of any internal investigative and disciplinary procedures to deal with unethical (if not unlawful and downright criminal) conduct. At least that was my impression after watching Mr Murdoch (as opposed to James) giving his testimony. It was a case of “well, I didn’t know it was going on and in any event the police are now handling it.”

What kind of company sees police investigation as a substitute for serious internal disciplinary investigation?

Based on their performance before the UK Parliamentary Committee, I can’t help thinking that perhaps Lieutenant Frank Drebin of Police Squad was better at policing LA than the Murdochs are at policing their own empire.

MEDIA: Yet another trumped-up News Limited burqa controversy ...

It starts from a News Limited local paper and then makes its way into News Limited tabloids and finally onto the News Limited group-blog.

Down there on Planet Murdoch, a place where people of certain faiths are regarded as having genetic defects, it is big news. But up here on Planet Earth, no one seems to give a shit.

And perhaps Planet Irf shouldn't either. Back to work ...

Words © 2010 Irfan Yusuf

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REVIEW: Correspondent's ugly truth

Fit to Print: Misrepresenting the Middle East
Joris Luyendijk
Scribe, 243pp, $29.95

The Pope had just delivered his Regensburg address. The entire Islamic world (whatever that means) was up in arms. Churches were ablaze, nuns shot, flags and effigies in flames. Or so we in the West were told.

One such article reached my attention. It was accompanied by a photo taking up a quarter of the tabloid page and showing angry men in Basra burning effigies of the Pope and former President Bush. The caption read: “Muslims in Basra hold massive protest against Pope’s recent lecture”. The headline was “Muslim fury against Pope”.

It wasn’t until the 9th paragraph that the article noted that some 300 people had gathered at the protest. Basra is a city of some 3 million. As Americans would say: “Do the math”. This was no massive protest.

My attempt at critiquing the work of the foreign correspondent reporting this story could be dismissed as the rant of a Crikey-reading (and in my case, writing) amateur. We know what good foreign correspondents do. As Joris Luyendijk notes, the occupants of editorial ivory towers want average punters like me to believe that

... [j]ournalists know what’s going on in the world … the news gives an overview of these events, and it is possible to keep that overview objective.

Journalists are the gatekeepers of truth and perspective on world events.

Luyendijk also shared this common person’s perspective when he was an Arabic-speaking anthropology graduate employed by a major Dutch newspaper and broadcaster to be their Middle Eastern correspondent in 1998. After 5 years, Luyendijk through in the towel just as American troops foolishly threw an American flag over the falling statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad after temporarily winning the war in Iraq. You’d think that would be the worst time for Luyendijk to leave the fray, just as all the uncivilised action was starting in the cradle of civilisation.

Here’s how Luyendijk describes CNN’s version:

We saw the colossal statue of Saddam Hussein being torn down in Firdos (Paradise) Square in Baghdad . Jubiland Iraqis screamed into the camera lens and struck the icon with their shoes. ‘Thank you, Mister Bush!’ The presenter solemnly described it as an ‘historic moment’ – the war was over. They could put the nightmare of Saddam Hussein behind them. Baghdad was celebrating its liberation …

And what about al-Jazeera? Luyendijk writes:

They were showing Firdos Square, too, but their montage offered a different slant. In the same square, we saw American soldiers triumphantly throwing an American flag over the statue of Saddam. Then we were shown feverish discussions and the American soldiers rushing to remove the flag. Al-Jazeera went on to show the jubilant Iraqis from CNN, only they were shot from a longer range: you could see how few there were actually standing in the square, and that most of the people were watching from a safe distance.

Joris Luyendijk provides a highly accessible, irreverent and light-hearted account of the realities of life as a foreign correspondent in the Middle East. This is more a book about than of journalism. He describes the secrets, shortcuts and tricks of the trade used by foreign correspondents for both print, radio and television audiences. This includes regurgitating the content of wire service reports in a manner that, if done in an academic context, would almost certainly be considered plagiarism. Luyendijk’s news agenda about events in Baghdad or Ramallah would not be set in Baghdad or Ramallah but rather by a foreign editor in Amsterdam who had probably never been to Baghdad or Ramallah.

Luyendijk soon learns that

... the basic task of being a correspondent is not that difficult. The editor … called when something happened, they faxed or emailed the press releases, and I’d retell them in my own words on the radio, or rework them into an article for the newspapers.

Occasionally the correspondent would make use of the list of “talking heads” – diplomats (always Western ones), academics, UN workers and human rights activists on the payroll of Western countries - for obtaining “on the ground” perspectives. Otherwise, the role of a correspondent was merely to be the person at the end of the news assembly line.

Foreign correspondents and editors who take themselves too seriously may not enjoy reading Luyendijk’s descriptions about the insensitivity they show when checking into five star hotels whilst on assignment in impoverished war zones, or of their responses to the commencement of American bombing in Iraq in 2003:

... a wave of suppressed relief swept over the correspondents … No bombing would have meant no work, after money had already been spent on coming to Amman.

Or how about this hilarious description of Western journalists in the office of the Iraqi Consul trying to secure a visa to Iraq on the eve of the invasion:

We jostled [the Consul] like children clustering around a dubious-looking man with candy … I saw grown men in tears by the embassy gates when they discovered they’d be reduced to peering through the fence.

Luyendijk discovered that as he travelled to different hotspots and spoke to ordinary people, there were so many stories far more interesting and enlightening to tell than just which agreements were reached between what leaders and what accusations they made against each other when the deals inevitably became unstuck.

As a correspondent, I could tell different stories about the same situation. The media could only choose one, and it was often the story that confirmed a commonly held notion …

So the impact of conventional media processes was to confirm pre-existing stereotypes. Luyendikj’s book cleverly dispels not just our (generally negative) stereotypes about Arabs, Israelis and Muslims but also our (both positive and negative) stereotypes about journalists. A highlight of the book is the regular sprinkling of Arab jokes about dictators and secret police and even Israeli jokes about anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. People don’t just weep and burn flags in this part of the world.

This book was first published in Dutch as Het zijn net mensen (roughly “People Like Us”). A veteran correspondent who had seen his best friend had died in the Iraq-Iran war gave Luyendijk this piece of advice:

If you want to write a book about the Middle East, you’d better do it in your first week. The longer you hang around here, the less you understand.

After finishing this book, readers will be glad Luyendijk didn’t take this advice. This is an outstanding book on the limitations of reportage in the world’s perennial trouble spot. Or as Luyendijk repeatedly reminds us, in the Middle East

... good journalism is a contradiction in terms.

Irfan Yusuf is the author of Once Were Radicals: My Years as a Teenage Islamo-Fascist. An edited version of this review was first published in The Australian on 3 October 2009.

Words © 2009 Irfan Yusuf

Apologies for the corny retro music in this video!




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MEDIA/VIDEO: Are American print newspapers dying?

Here is the text accompanying this video from Al-Jazeera English.

US newspapers are battling to survive amid a recession and changing technologies that are leaving even the best known titles struggling.

John Terrett went to Roanoke in the state of Virginia to find out how one newspaper is managing to stay afloat in stormy times.

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MEDIA: The op-ed – a diminishing art? cont ...

Here’s some more stuff about the art and science of writing op-eds. It’s based on notes I took from a recent session at the Sydney Writers’ Festival.

[09] It will be an enormous tragedy when op-ed writers are regarded as traitors because of their criticism of governments. Criticism, if not downright cynicism, is necessary if newspaper writers (both reporters and columnists) are to perform their role properly. There is nothing unpatriotic about expressing a critical view on government policy, including a wartime policy.

[10] David Reiff claimed that the American media after 9/11 were no less uncritical than they were during previous wars.

[11] It’s a fact that the New York Times once hired a reporter who was a friend of the Bush administration. That decision turned out to be a disaster for both parties.

[12] John Gray answered Dave Reiff’s claim about wartime comment. He said that censorship during all previous wars was institutional in that newspapers were required by law to be censored. However, the difference in the post-9/11 environment was that newspapers engaged in self-censorship.

[13] Irony and satire presuppose common historical memories. It is much harder to do satire when the common memory is segmented as it is now.

[14] Some would argue that cynicism is a toxic form of self-censorship. Is this really the case? Or is credulity the real enemy? Or is it allowing one’s self to be too influenced by a feel-good factor?

Words © 2008 Irfan Yusuf

NB: To switch off the funky music, go to the playlist at the bottom of this homepage.


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BLOG: Tim Blair's Saturday morning rant ...

Far-Right blogger Tim Blair has now been given space on the Daily Telegraph website. At 4:59am on Saturday 17 May 2008, Blair expressed his displeasure with an article yours truly wrote for The Age.

I'm not exactly sure why anyone would wake up at 4:59am to express one's support for torture, kangaroo courts and politically motivated prosecutions. No, I'm not talking about Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria or any other tin-pot Middle Eastern regime. I'm talking about Guantanamo Bay.

Blair, of course, supports Guantanamo Bay-style punishments. He probably also supports the US policy of extraordinary rendition. Blair is quite happy to see anyone suspected of criminal offences being beaten senseless, having dogs attack their testicles and other similar forms of punishment. Throw out the Magna Carta. Throw out the Geneva Convention. Throw out the Rule of Law. The only law that counts is Blair's Law.


And on what basis does Blair support Guantanamo internment?

Say what you will about Gitmo, but unlike Khadr’s father the guards there aren’t known for encouraging prisoners to blast themselves to death.

So it really doesn't matter what guards do, as long as they don't teach you to become a suicide bomber. I'm so glad that the NSW Department of Corrective Services doesn't follow Blair's Law.

Blair continues ...

Rather than whining over this, Muslims would do better to end mistreatment of children by their own families.

As if it's just a Muslim thing. As if all those Australians who complained about the treatment of (arguably ex-Muslim) David Hicks at Guantanamo Bay were just a bunch of whining Muslims.

My article mentions The Age newspaper, Dick Smith and an American film maker criticising Guantanamo internment. Clearly, all these people are just whining Muslims. Maybe one of them should change his name to Dick bin Smith.

One of Blair's few sane readers, a chap named Rod Blaine, had this to say ...

Tim, I agree with you that Khadr pere is a piece of work, but Yusuf’s point about Khadr fils still stands. We’re not talking about a David Hicks or a John Walker Lindh who, in his 20s, goes and seeks out a new family amongst the jihadists on the other side of the world. “Obey your father and mother” is a principle that, all else being equal, it’d be good to drill into more teenagers (Exhibit A: Corey Worthingless); unfortunately the downside is that now and then the father is a Khadr or a John Deaves, and parental authority is abused.

I disagree with Irfan Yusuf at times, but for all that he is a moderate, largely sensible, credible Muslim (ie, won’t be written off as an apostate like Manji or Hirsi Ali) who is committed to the Western liberal democratic process. Committment to the process is the vital point of agreement: we can disagree over the policy results later. Zinging him with “gotchas” won’t answer the substance of the point he makes.

Obviously Sheik Rod is just another whining Muslim. Meanwhile, Daniel Lewis injects some logic into the debate with this beauty:

I believe Irfan Yusuf still lives with his parents.

What a devastating refutation. And true to form, Daniel's buddy ElCid is as usual promoting his own Final Solution - turning Muslims into compost.

El Cid replied to RebeccaH
Sat 17 May 08 (11:36am)
We both know it ain’t gonna happen, Lady Rebecca.

If not “mistreated”, it’s “humiliated”, if neither of the above two, it’s “Islamaphobia”.

Actually, Islamaphobia is a damn good word to describe this THING.

Frothing at the mouth and their bite, infects others.

Next article, The Compost Solution.

Yes, you read it correctly. Prince al-Waleed bin Talal, who owns at least a 7% stake in News Corporation, should be turned into compost. I hope Stephen Mayne uses the next News Limited AGM to ask Sheik Rupert bin Murdoch whether he supports such sentiments being expressed in one of his newspapers.

ElCid puts finishing touches on Muslim compost heap.

Words © 2008 Irfan Yusuf

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OPINION: John Stone & Why Conservatives Need to Assimilate More

Australians have an image of New Zealand as being a politically correct country. David Lange is remembered as the anti-nuclear and anti-American Prime Minister Prime Minister. While Australians struggle with the notion of saying sorry to indigenous peoples, New Zealand actively promotes and encourages indigenous cultures.

So it was with some surprise that Australians watched and read and heard from various forms of media that some four mosques across New Zealand were attacked following the London bombings. And it is with even more surprise that Australians learn of the rise and rise of Winston Peters and similar political phenomena.

We had our own female Winston Peters. Her name was Pauline Hanson. In the 1996 Federal Elections in Australia, Ms Hanson won the seat of Oxley in Queensland from the Labor Party. This seat was an ALP heartland. It was the seat of former Labor Parliamentary leader Bill Hayden. Hanson won the seat as a formerly endorsed and then disendorsed Liberal candidate.

I was an endorsed candidate for the Liberal Party in another safe Labor seat. The seat of Reid sits in the geographical heart of Sydney. The election occurred some 2 months after the September 11 terrorist attacks. Despite the ethno-religious background suggested by my name, I achieved a 5.1% swing on a two-party preferred basis. It was one of the biggest swings in NSW.

It shocks many conservative Australians to read and hear allegedly conservative types suggesting that certain ethno-religious communities need to assimilate more. This is also proving to be a rallying cry in the upcoming New Zealand elections. Yet how legitimate is this call?

Former National Party Senator John Stone wrote in The Australian newspaper recently that Muslim migrants do not know how to assimilate. His call is for Australia’s multicultural policies to be reviewed. He is typical of a growing number of conservatives.

But is Stone right? When speaking about Australians being sick of Muslim migrants, which Australians is Mr Stone referring to? Is he referring to those millions of Australians who continue to have accounts with the National Australia Bank even after a Muslim Australian was appointed as their CEO?

Or is he referring to millions of ARL and AFL fans who continue to watch the games notwithstanding the generous support given to both codes by Muslim Australian John Ilhan? Has Mr Stone read Mr Ilhan’s profile in the recent edition of the Australian Financial Review Magazine?

Ilhan is a mainstream Muslim and a mainstream Australian. The AFR Magazine writes that Ilhan ...

... carries his Islamic faith with him everyday … applying what he sees as basic
tenets of honesty and integrity to his business.

And what are these basic tenets. First, there is “asking for forgiveness”. Then there is loving one’s neighbour as one loves one’s self. He won’t open an outlet next door to a competitor he knew, even if it be a former employee or a cousin.

Stone has clearly not read much about Muslim migration to Australia. Had he done so, he would have realised that Muslims have been dealing with Australia for longer than even European settlers.

Recently published research by Professor Abdullah Saeed of the University of Melbourne and funded by the Department of Immigration confirms that Muslim fishermen traded with Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders centuries before the first Europeans discovered New Holland. Indeed, outlines of Australia appeared on Arab maps daring back to the 12th century.

Former Islamic Council of Victoria Secretary Bilal Cleland, himself an Anglo-Australian with ancestry going back to the First Fleet, has written and published a history of Muslims in Australia. Cleland’s book covers the period from the Makassan fishermen referred to above and covers the period of post-war migration that included large numbers of Albanian and (then known as) Yugoslav Muslim migrants.

Cleland deals at length with the Cypriot and Turkish Muslims who arrived during the last decades of the White Australia Policy. The Turkish communities have by far the largest number of mosques and Islamic centres across Australia, including in regional cities and country towns.

Indeed, one Turkish sufi dervish (elder), Professor Mahmud Esad Cosan, is known to have established the first sufi hospices in regional NSW. Professor Cosan was killed in a car accident in February 2001 after opening a hospice in Dubbo.

Professor Cosan’s movement is now part of the new Turkish conservative government which has proven to be the most pro-EU and pro-Western government in Turkey’s history. So much for fringe Muslim values.

Returning to politics, Australians of all backgrounds handed out election material on polling booths for the Liberal Party during my campaign. Australians of Turkish, Lebanese, Greek, Afghan, Bosnian, Serbian, Iraqi, Indian, Italian, Irish, Japanese and Anglo-Australian backgrounds.

Afghans and Iraqis opposed to mandatory detention still handed out material for me. Meanwhile, a close family friend and Aussie Muslim bureaucrat, Abdul Rizvi, continued to implement the policy of mandatory detention.

Migrants of all shapes and colours are an integral part of mainstream Australia and New Zealand. Perhaps those conservatives insistent on marginalising Muslims and other migrant groups need to wake up and assimilate into social reality. Or perhaps they just need to get out more often.

Words © 2005 Irfan Yusuf


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