7 of the best quotes from al-jazeera editor's lecture in ithaca
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7 of the best quotes from Al-Jazeera editor's lecture in IthacaMORE HEADLINES (HTTP:// ITHACAVOICE.COM/CATEGORY/NEWS/MORE-HEADLINES/), NEWS(HTTP:// ITHACAVOICE.COM/CATEGORY/NEWS/) , TOP(HTTP:// ITHACAVOICE.COM/CATEGORY/TOP/) / OCTOBER 19, 2015 / BY BENEDETTA LUCIANA SARACARNAGHI (HTTP:// ITHACAVOICE.COM/AUTHOR/BENEDETTA-LUCIANA-SARA-CARNAGHI/)
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ITHACA, N.Y. — Amjad Atallah, editor-in-chief at Al Jazeera America, gave a
lecture titled “Journalism Under Fire” on Thursday in Cornell’s Lewis
Auditorium, Goldwin Smith Hall.
(http://ithacavoice.com/wp-
content/uploads/2015/10/Screen-Shot-
2015-10-19-at-8.40.51-AM.png)Amjad Atallah, editor-in-chief at Al Jazeera America
The lecture was this year’s installment of The Daniel W. Kops Freedom of the
Press series, which has been offered for over a decade, according to Prof.
Michael Jones-Correa, chair of government, who introduced Atallah.
Below are my favorite quotes from the lecture.
1 – On the uniquenessof the Al JazeeraMedia Network“Al Jazeera Arabic was the first
Pan-Arabic news channel. It was
government-funded, but not
government-run Many who
worked for BBC prior but who
were from all over the Middle East
and all over the region provided a
unique perspective on a region that
had never encountered dissidents
or opponents of governments on TV opened up and exploded the entire
media landscape in the Middle East.”
2 – On Atallah’s own journey: How he got intojournalism from his graduate program inReligious Studies at the University of Virginia
“I was studying Holocaust literature, and we were studying colonialism in the
Middle East and a number of other related topics, and one of the questions
that everybody had was that many people did not find out just about how
horrible the Holocaust was and what was happening until after the fact, even
though governments knew and people knew, and people were trying to bring
it up
There was a reporter named Roy Gutman who had been assigned to go to
Germany and set up a bureau for Newsday, and while he was there the war in
Yugoslavia started, so he was sent to Yugoslavia to figure out what was going
on They found there way to a concentration camp in the middle of Europe in
the 1990s All of a sudden people began reading and realizing that there were
death camps in the middle of Europe close to every European capital and
there was no international response about it.”
“I could not believe that these kind of things could happen again, again, and
again, despite all the slogans about never again What should I do? What do I
need to be involved in and how do I need to be engaged? So I cashed out with
my Masters, if anybody with a Religious Studies degree could be said to be
cashing out, and I started working on humanitarian issues, on Bosnia That
effectively started my professional career. Some of the most amazing people
that I met were journalists, who actually were changing the world. Without
the reporting that came out of Bosnia it is unclear what would have
happened.”
3 – How the world has changed for journalistsand reporters 20 years later: The situation AlJazeera faces right now
“We have a tough time at Al Jazeera because of the kind of reporting that we
do and the places that we do it in The pressures we get from reporting a story
that governments hope desperately not having reported can be extreme.”
“Is it a little bit self-centered, a little bit narcissistic for journalists to say
‘What about us?’ I would say no, not because journalists can’t be narcissists
but because it’s actually, I believe, a correlation between attacks on
journalists and the greater crimes that are taking place around them on the
stories they are trying to cover.”
(http://ithacavoice.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Screen-Shot-2015-10-19-at-
8.40.11-AM.png)Photo courtesy of Al Jazeera America's website
CONTENT CONTINUED BELOW
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ANNOUNCEMENT
4 – The role of journalists as a check on power“We are supposed to be a check on power. Unchecked power, by definition, is
dangerous, and that’s why journalism exists. Journalism exists to be able to
hold all power centers to account, whether they’re corporate, whether
they’re financial, whether they’re governmental.”
“Governments and militaries know this. They also know that if they can
control the narrative, and if they can deny the story from getting out, they
know that they can actually push their agenda a bit further. Reporters
provide a reality check, but not everyone wants you to know what that
reality check is
Reporters are supposed to not pick the narrative for you, they are supposed
to identify what’s happening on the ground, and they are supposed to
challenge all the narratives that are presented, and you are to ultimately
make up your mind as to what the story is.”
5 – About censorship
“Public pressure is actually a very strong method of censoring journalists,
especially in times of national distress. If your country is under attack, if you
feel there are horrible things happening in your country, anything from a
terrorist attack to civil unrest there is a normal human tendency to rally
around the flag, but a lot of people confuse the flag with the government, a
lot of people confuse the flag with the narrative that is being presented by
official power centers, and so when reporters try to report outside of what
becomes conventional wisdom during these times of national stress they can
actually be shut down by their peers, they can actually be shut down by the
public.”
6 – On the treatment of journalists coveringarmed con\icts“’Journalists,’ the manual says, ‘are generally regarded as civilians, but may in
some instances be deemed unprivileged belligerents’ Journalists would have
less rights than a soldier from the enemy side that was captured.”
“The manual warns that reporting on military operations can be very similar
to correcting intelligence or even spying, so it calls on journalists to act
openly and with the permission of relevant authorities. It says that
governments may need to censor journalists’ work or take other security
measures so that journalists do not reveal sensitive information to the
enemy.”
7 – On the meaning of violence againstjournalists
“...The risks faced by journalists — just like the civilian populations that they
represent — are extreme. That violence is not incidental to the greater
violence that is happening in these countries. I would argue it’s an
instrumental part of that violence. Attacks on journalists are nothing less
than an effort to intimidate the general population.”
“The impact of the intimidation and violence against journalists is to make
that other violence that much easier to perpetrate. Imagine a world where
everything you knew about your world is provided to you by a lobbying group
press release. Imagine if all you knew about the world is what politicians told
you and then you would be confused because they change their mind often
That Orwellian kind of world is not far away. We always have to struggle
against it. We always have to fight against it.”
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