Gibburt

No matter how many fancy internet applications become available to us, language barriers are still very real. As it was with the book I wanted to talk about today: People like us from Joris Luyendijk. Originally only released in Dutch, People like us (or in Dutch ‘Het zijn net mensen’) sold very well, but nonetheless took 3 years to be translated to English. On a more practical note my review is based upon the Dutch version of the book so we will have to assume that the translators did their job properly.

In 1998 Joris Luyendijk was barely out of university when he accepted a position as foreign correspondent in Cairo. This started a hectic five year period during which he reported on about every major news story the Middle East produced.

But although the period 1998 -2003 saw many world shaking events taking place in the Middle East, People like us hardly uses these events as more than a background setting, even Luyendijk’s personal life gets little to no attention. No, the true theme of the book is the ‘how’ of journalism as practiced in the Middle East. And this, as it turns out, is not very good.

The book speaks about major Middle East BBC reporters who do not speak a word of Arabic, or how every interview that makes it to western newspapers is either organized by NGO’s with no other goal than increasing their funding, or by proponents or opponents of the local regimes with their obvious interests. Luyendijlk describes how in the Israeli conflict the journalists are willingly played by both sides and that the truth goes to whoever does the best selling. The pièce de résistance is maybe the coverage of the American invasion of Iraq where the major news networks in the US had investigated beforehand what the average American viewer wanted to see as opposed to showing what was actually happening.

Trying to be as impartial as practically possible he also takes care to explain the difficulties facing journalists working in an area like the Middle East, such as the ever present time pressure and the impossibility to provide objective news in countries governed under authoritarian regimes. Furthermore he is not afraid to take some of the blame on himself: it is refreshing to finally read a journalist who is not afraid to say that he just does not know.

‘People like us’ is sad, funny, informing and entertaining all at the same time and you are never going to read a newspaper the same way again. I mean there is a big difference between theoretically knowing how news reaches your living room and actually being confronted with that process. You could see it as your first visit to a hamburger factory, after that hamburgers never taste the same again.

For more reviews please see here.

Filed under: Politics by Robert Nijssen | Social tagging: books > Islam > Joris Luyendijk > journalism > Middle East