- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Read other letters about this article
Sounds like you've changed your argument a bit. It was a change for the better, dropping those "nevers" and "onlys". I apologize if I was overly aggressive in challenging you, I'd just been having a very similar argument with someone else and probably unloaded some of that on you.
FTR, I don't feel any different from you when I see or hear those kinds of things ... it took a while for me to catch on because my Arabic isn't good enough to pick up nuances like this (watching the news was supposed to help with that!), but then I got a little over-sensitive to it.
I hope you see that it isn't a 'fine point'. Your comment implied that AJ (and maybe you meant other outlets, I don't know) ideologically mandated (or say, exclusively used) these two words. The facts are otherwise. There's a great deal of argument about these things, word choices and other editorial and reportage topics, on journalistic grounds --- not ideological ones. The arguments have been going on for a while. If you watch, you can see that they have had some impact. I don't have any examples where anyone has achieved perfection.
RE the conference: I really didn't have to make the statement you suggested, since it was made in much stronger language by others. (Not to over-generalize, but once you get a bunch of Arab journos arguing, it can be pretty harrowing) One of those was Mohammed Khatib, whom I mentioned before, because he made a very strong case against the dichotomy and as I said, he made it on journalistic grounds.
Another was the West Bank bureau chief for AJ (A Saudi national, if it matters). She acknowledged that it could be a problem and that she tried to stay on top of 'questionable copy' (not her term, one offered in translation by an American colleague), but pointed, with some legitimacy, to instances where different descriptions were relevant, and in context didn't come across the way we would think they do. I think Shireen made a decent point, and she was very impressive, but I think Mohammed won that argument.
