Case Studies
Google News Initiative Grants in Africa and the Middle East Yield Mixed Results
A study found many Google News Initiative projects in Middle East and Africa struggle to become more than makeshift versions of the original idea.
A study found many Google News Initiative projects in Middle East and Africa struggle to become more than makeshift versions of the original idea.
Daraj co-founder Diana Moukalled discusses the outlet’s origins in Lebanon, its impact, its funding, and reporting on women’s rights and corruption across the Middle East.
After 14 years at the helm of the Arab world’s leading network of investigative journalists, Rana Sabbagh reflects on what she’s learned and offers advice to investigative reporters, in a farewell letter to Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism.
A growing cadre of journalists is pursing assertive reporting on the deterioration that they see and experience daily, and which represents, for many of them, a more acute threat than the battles over radical Islam that dominate American coverage of the region.
In the past year, a group of Arab journalists has been working secretly in Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Algeria, and Yemen as part of a global network of investigative reporters mining the so called “Panama Papers.” They found that some Arab strongmen and their business partners are linked to offshore companies and bank accounts. What’s astonishing about this story is not that Arab dictators are going offshore to hide their wealth and evade sanctions. It’s that a community of Arab journalists is continuing to do investigative reporting in a region where there is increasingly little tolerance for accountability of any kind.
The majority of the Arab press — whether available in print or online — depends largely for their news on what national or international press agencies produce. The only real investment is placed in supporting columnists whose opinions and analysis reflect the particular editorial line of the publisher and the owners of that outlet. This disproportionate support for columnists rather than reporters can best be seen when you ask any follower of Arab media to name a particular news reporter or investigative journalist connected with a particular journal.
The lights of free speech are being steadily extinguished across the Arab world, heralding a new era of ignorance, intolerance, and repression. Saddest of all, the majority of Arabs — who saw free speech as the only gain from the Arab Spring upheavals – now seem willing to accept the loss of this universal human right, in return for promises of stability and economic prosperity.