I find Nasr’s firing troubling. Yes, she made a mistake. Reporters covering a beat should not be issuing condolences for any of the actors they cover. It undermines their credibility. But we also gain a great deal by having an Arabic-speaking, Lebanese-Christian female journalist covering the Middle East for CNN, and if her only sin in 20 years is a 140-character message about a complex figure like Fadlallah, she deserved some slack. She should have been suspended for a month, but not fired. It’s wrong on several counts.
To begin with, what has gotten into us? One misplaced verb now and within hours you can have a digital lynch mob chasing after you — and your bosses scrambling for cover. A journalist should lose his or her job for misreporting, for misquoting, for fabricating, for plagiarizing, for systemic bias — but not for a message like this one.
What signal are we sending young people? Trim your sails, be politically correct, don’t say anything that will get you flamed by one constituency or another. And if you ever want a job in government, national journalism or as president of Harvard, play it safe and don’t take any intellectual chances that might offend someone. In the age of Google, when everything you say is forever searchable, the future belongs to those who leave no footprints.
Then there is the Middle East angle. If there is one thing that we should have learned from our interventions in Lebanon, Afghanistan and Iraq, it is how few Americans understand these places. We need interpreters alive to their nuances.
I was in Baghdad after the U.S. invasion and met these young Bush appointees who, as Rajiv Chandrasekaran notes in his book “Imperial Life in the Emerald City,” were often chosen because they were 100 percent loyal to Bush, even if they were 100 percent ignorant of Iraq. Their ignorance helped fuel our failure there. “Two people who sought jobs with the U.S. occupation authority [in Iraq] said they were even asked their views on Roe v. Wade,” Chandrasekaran wrote.
I’ve never met Octavia Nasr or Fadlallah. Fadlallah clearly hated Israel, supported attacks on Israelis and opposed the U.S. troops in Lebanon and Iraq. But he also opposed Hezbollah’s choking dogmatism and obedience to Iran; he wanted Lebanon’s Shiites to be independent and modern, and he built a regional following through his social commentaries.
Augustus Richard Norton, of Boston University, a Shiite expert, said this about Fadlallah, whom he knew: “He argued that women should have equal opportunities to men and be well educated. He even argued that women have a right to hit their husband back because it was not appropriate for a spouse to be beaten by their husbands. He was not afraid to speak about sexuality, and he even once gave [a mosque sermon] about sexual urges and female masturbation. It was common to find young people who followed his writings all over the region.” Indeed, Nasr later explained that her tweet about Fadlallah was because he took a “contrarian and pioneering stand among Shia clerics on women’s rights.”
Michael Tomasky, the editor of “Democracy: A Journal of Ideas,” pointed out an essay by the liberal secular Shiite Lebanese journalist Hanin Ghaddar — on the Web site Now Lebanon — recalling how Fadlallah intervened with her conservative father to allow her to live alone in Beirut, telling her father in a letter that he “had no right to tell me what to do, as I was an independent and sane and adult woman.”
Ghaddar said she came to understand that “only figures like Fadlallah could change the status quo. People who position themselves as anti-Hezbollah, critics of resistance, or atheists, will rarely be heard within the Shia community, because people will not listen to them. ... Fadlallah on the other hand could reach out to the people because he was one of them. ... People like him, if strengthened, can bring about real change. He is one of those rare people whom Hezbollah and the Iranian leadership feared ... because people liked him and respected him.”
Of course, Fadlallah was not just a social worker. He had some dark side. People at CNN tell me Nasr knew both. But here’s what I know: The Middle East has to change in order to thrive, and that change has to come from within, from change agents who are seen as legitimate and rooted in their own cultures. They may not be America’s cup of tea. But we need to know about them, and understand where our interests converge — not just demonize them all.
That’s why I prefer to get my news from a CNN reporter who can actually explain why thousands of men and women are mourning an aged Shiite cleric — whom we consider nothing more than a terrorist — than a reporter who doesn’t know at all, or worse, doesn’t dare to say.
Saturday, July 17, 2010
Thank you Tom Friedman - Again.
via nytimes.com
Friday, July 16, 2010
Christo Strikes again! Be there
via nytimes.com
Review the environmental impact statement here:
http://www.overtheriverinfo.com/media/uploads/July2010_OTR_Executive_Summary.pdf
Thursday, July 15, 2010
Share This!?
I’m intrigued by the way these “share icons” have proliferated like freakin’ spores. (Hey, there’s another name for a share service /icon, “Spore”)
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Sean O’Connor
Creative Leverage
Great ideas to boost your business.
206 / 650 / 7660
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Sean O’Connor
Creative Leverage
Great ideas to boost your business.
206 / 650 / 7660
http://designinfluence.org/into-the-woods/
AIGA Seattle presents Into the Woods running 15 to 17 October 2010. The gathering seems to offer an opportunity for exchange and workshops rather than the usual conference format of presenter and audience. There will apparently be 6 speakers but for the time being only two are confirmed:
Gail Anderson, Creative Director at SpotCo and former Senior Art Director for Rolling Stone mag;
Steve Frykholm, Creative Director and VP at Herman MillerThe reasonable pricetag—$575 for AIGA members for all events, accommodations and meals— and the setting of the conference at the Sleeping Lady Mountain Resort might just be reason enough to go.
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