In the June 15 Sun-Times, Maudlyne Ihejirkia tells us the Northwestern campus in Doha, Qatar, just graduated its first class. Some three dozen students received degrees in journalism or communications.
Kate Durham, an American who’s managing editor of Egypt Today, says every issue of the monthly English-language magazine (not to mention every page of its impressive website) has to go to the censorship office before it’s published. But the relationship is 33 years old “and we have a very good understanding of what their standards are,” Durham e-mailed me. “It’s pretty much a formality.”
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And yet, “we don’t avoid sensitive topics—we’ve discussed religious tensions and even homosexuality—but we are very careful in how we cover them. We are meticulous about our facts, neutral wording and in presenting multiple/opposing viewpoints. For example, when we interviewed the director of a documentary on homosexuality in the Middle East, we had a separate sidebar with a local sheikh presenting his views against homosexuality.”
“I used to say in Egypt that freedom of the press is a cat and mouse game,” says Janet Key, a Chicagoan who taught journalism at the American University in Cairo from 2001 to 2008, when she started teaching in Doha for Medill. “It is in Qatar as well, in that you don’t know what the boundaries are.”
“The only survival skills I’ve taught,” Key tells me, in an extended conversation conducted by phone and e-mail, “I’ve taught in Cairo when the American University was located directly on Tahrir Square.” In 2005, protesters seeking to bring down the Mubarak regime filled the square. “The skills were simply precautions on how to deal with a crowd that could at any moment turn into a mob,” Key goes on, “how to deal with police and military (obvious pointers, like not arguing with someone who has a weapon in hand), how to deal/not deal with tear gas, etc. More safety tips than anything else.”
Actually, says Key, a lot want careers in public relations. As for the others, “They want to write,” she says. “They may be sheltered and innocent, but they want to do something about the world. As a Bangladeshi student told me, “I want to tell the stories of my people.”
“If state media ever loosens up,” Durham says, “these are the people who can help reform the system.”
