Challenges ahead for media in the Arab world

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Taking the stage by storm with his remarkable speech on the challenges facing media in the Arab world was non other than Al Jazeera's Wadah Khanfar. His speech began with admitting that journalists are going trough a period of many difficulties, but that we should all try to get out of the troubled waters we're drowning in.

"In the Arab world in particular the crisis that is influencing journalism is also influencing us, however we stand a great chance as far as news reporting is concerned here in the region, to excel and to introduce great stories," he said.

This is not only because this region is "one of the most complicated hot spots in the world" with troubled countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, Somalia, Sudan, Iran, and Pakistan. Khanfar explained that at present, in the profession of journalism, there are great young journalists, who have started taking this profession seriously, and there is training taking place, which makes the outlook for this profession in the region enormous.

Khanfar revealed that he subscribed to Joseph Nye's theory of power, which stated that there are two kinds of power influencing our lives. The first is soft power, the power to attract people's attention such as music, media, culture, and other such things. Then there's hard power underpinned by the military, economy and other elements that could transform the tools of power and put them into action. This theory, however, was augmented by Khanfar, who added a third kind of power.

"One of the most important powers that enables the soft power and hard power to take place is what I call the power of the collective mind. This region in particular has unique cultural and historical legacy.

"The collective mind and the collective memory that has developed through the last few centuries has introduced to us something that if we do not understand, as journalists, most likely we will fail to analyse reality and we will also fail to foresee developments in the future," he said.

Neglecting to understand the collective mind was one of the main dilemmas, Khanfar noted, that the Western media faced while covering the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and most recently Lebanon. This resulted in an inability to comprehend the results of such reports and their role in complicating the situation in the region. Khanfar recalled the time when the war in Iraq had just erupted, and he was busy covering the war in northern Kurdistan. He relocated to Baghdad in the next few months where he met with hundreds of colleagues from the many Western networks who had come to report on the war.

"The dilemma that our colleagues faced at that time was that they had to see reality through the eyes of their interpreters, and they had to satisfy the urgent needs of their editors in feeding a continuous stream of stories on a daily basis.

"All of us are required to feed maybe one or two reports a day to our 24 hour news channels, and therefore we have been left with little time to contemplate, to think, study, and understand the subject we are reporting on," he said.

Khanfar stressed that, for the region, history is not a matter of the past, but something that people are living and that continues to affect their lives, and is most likely to shape their futures. For other nations, history is a term that describes something that has already passed, or something to forget about and move forward.

"In the case of Iraq, it was very important for those who covered the war in Iraq to understand what Iraq was before and what Iraq is now," he said.

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