Something is missing.
Something very important.
Our world seems to be getting smaller every day. Cultures are mixing, people are travelling, borders are disappearing. Thanks to technology, the digital age, social media, thank you very much, this is great. The era we live in opens up huge opportunities for humankind.
But at the same time the world is still a pretty big physical structure, inhabited by so many different people in so many different countries with so many different cultures, customs and habits. Worldviews. There is so much diversity and otherness in the world — it’s beautiful. But also quite overwhelming.
So here is my hypothesis: By seemingly getting smaller maybe the world is actually getting bigger.
Because we think we know about others while we actually don’t.
I’ve had moments as a freelance writer in the Middle East and Subsaharan Africa when I wanted to shoot myself because I just didn’t get it. I was culture-shocked. I felt offended when there was nothing to be offended about. I felt hurt when there was nothing to be hurt about. I put on a sad face after hearing something I thought was sad, while everyone else around me was celebrating.
And that’s when I realised: “I have no bloody clue what this is all about. I didn’t grow up in this culture, I am not part of this religion, I don’t speak the language, I don’t understand anything — how can I possible paint an accurate picture of the people’s situation?” This happened to me in Tanzania, in Sierra Leone, in Cameroon, in Palestine, Lebanon, South Africa, Palestine, everywhere.
The challenge of a foreign reporter.
So here we are, witnessing an era of global migration, and in an attempt to keep us all updated about what’s happening in all those far-away places the people are coming from, main stream media is shovelling information into our faces.
And the question is: What do we really know? What do we learn?
I would say less than we might think we do. Another example: We might have read dozens of articles about this place called “Syria”. But do we really know what it means to be there, right now? Can a middle-class German Christian from Berlin who lives in a house with his family, who pays into a pension fund every month and goes on holiday to the Seychelles (not saying there’s anything wrong with that, it’s amazing that we can live like that), know what it means to be a Sunni Muslim from the outskirts of the Syrian town of Idlib whose farm was just bombed by the Russian airforce, whose son went missing in Turkey in attempt to get out of the country because he is wanted by the government’s army, and who is forced to find a new home no matter where?
No.
And that’s fine, not blaming anyone. But then — the story of the “Syrian whose house was bombed” is probably not new to the German middle class media consumer. Because wait, yeah, we’ve seen something like this in a documentary last week on some TV channel we trust. Or heard it in a podcast. On top of the billion articles we’ve already read on “refugees”.
There is this notion of “knowing”. But what we actually know is only what the Media we consume has given us.
And who is the Media? Human beings.
It’s people who, most of the time, were raised in a society, with the set of values and the worldview of that society. And while for the individual it might be considered the one-and-only society, it is very likely that the worldview, customs and habits differ significantly from other societies in this gigantic world.
This applies to everywhere: The news we get from the Middle East are mostly produced by Western journalists talking about the Middle East. The news the Middle East gets from the West are mostly produced by Middle Eastern journalists talking about the West.
Foreign correspondents are, as the name implies, foreigners in the world they report from. Their task is to simplify a world not immediately accessible to their audience. It’s the toughest part of all, trying to make a culture you don’t understand yourself accessible for people at home who understand it even less.
There is a lot of space for misconception and misunderstandings.
And this is a fundamental problem.
Seeing and describing the world through the eyes of a foreigner, as the foreign correspondent inevitably does, is an important feature in the media’s attempt to draw the big picture of the world and make it comprehensible. But it will always be biased. Which is also fine — everything that is translated from somebody’s mind into a piece of media is biased. But we are just getting one side of the bias.
What I am saying is: Our sources are not diverse enough. So there is something missing. The other side.
800 foreign correspondents went into Gaza during the 2014 war. We were in the plain age of social media, and while all the foreigners went in to report for the Western World, Gazawi journalists were tweeting, posting on facebook, streaming what was happening.
I was in South Africa at the time, and kept myself updated by reading through my Gazan friend’s facebook walls, subscribing to their tweets, talking to them on skype, on whatsapp, viber, translating our conversations and the texts they produced for Arab media. And I shared hem.
Me and Ilham Rawoot started a series called “Stories from the Strip”:
There is one thing that will always make the story of a western foreign correspondent different from the story a local journalist would tell, whether that is Gaza or any other conflict zone in the world.
The foreign correspondent can leave. It’s our choice to be there.
I came to Gaza a few weeks after the war when all the foreign reporters had left. I spent a lot of time with the most amazing photographer Ezz Al Zanoon. We walked the streets, we sat on the beach, we worked on stories. I thought I would like to do a series of stories to show the “beautiful sides” of Gaza, and Ezz kept saying: “What are you talking about, beautiful Gaza? Look at people’s faces, no one is happy in this place.”
A feeling started spreading through my body and mind which became the root of this project.
I started asking myself: “What am I doing here?” And “Who am I to tell their stories?”. I don’t know what it feels like to have lived through three wars in 7 years. I don’t know what it means to have never traveled more than 40 km. I can come in, hang out for a few days, interview some people about what it feels like and write it down. But actually I have no idea what it feels like.
Of course there are two sides to this coin. Of course not only the people who suffer can report on painful events. As my fellow Tow Knight fellow Sérgio Spagnuolo pointed out, “John Hersey’s “Hiroshima” is a very humane, thoughtful story — although he wasn’t there when the bombs fell. And one of the best historians on Brazilian politics was an American, Thomas Skidmore.”
Reporting from abroad from within our societal frame is a necessity. But in order to avoid the stream of information to become a homogenous mass where everything seems to make sense to us we need our sources to be more diverse.
Sometimes we must accept that not everything can make sense to us.
Being shelled by a foreign airforce will never make sense to me as a 28-year-old citizen of Germany — it is simply not part of my emotional repertoire, and even if I go to a warzone as a foreign reporter I will always be able to go home.
The point is: We must disrupt the conventional way of foreign reporting.
What is missing in the world’s media landscapes are the unedited, untouched voices from the ground. Because most of the time we get information through an intermediary, the correspondent. Sometimes we get someone from the region who speaks English to explain to us what this is about. And at the end of the chain is an editor who wraps the story up into a consumable package and then delivers it to us.
Again, this is a necessary part of the big picture. But it will always someone trying to explain something to us.
The question I’ve been asking myself is: What would be the purest form of journalism?
Jehad Saftawi, an outstanding videographer, great mind and beautiful human being from Gaza, had the answer: the live stream.
Jehad and his wife Lara Abu Ramadan, both journalists, set up a live stream from their flat in central Gaza during the war in 2014. For them it was the only means to capture time and space as they are happening. No intermediary cuts anything out, no one analyses, no one changes anything. Rawness.
So… what if we can create a livestream of minds that is kept flowing through the use of a mix of media?
What, if we can skip the correspondent, skip the editor, skip the analyst, and give the audience the raw ingredients of a story instead of a ready-to-go-meal?
This is the essence of the idea I am working on: To form a collective of young people — writers, videographers, photographers, poets and people who have the ability to share things in a comprehensible way — whose aim is to open a window to their world to the audience outside.
That can be a story. It can be a photo. It can be a series of photos. It can be a diary entry, a comment, a snapchat story or a facebook post, a skype transcript or a whatsapp-conversation — anything that goes beyond the ready-made stories we already have so much of. And in order to make it accessible for all sides — the only “edit” will be a translation, so that Arabic content becomes visible for non-arabic-speakers or -readers, and non-arabic content becomes visible for arabic-speakers.
The aim is to provide human context to all the information readily available out there in the media. Human context not in the I-tell-you-a-human-story-from-my-point-of-view-style but human context through the actual humans making what their views, thoughts and products accessible.
More to come soon.
Note: This project is at the very beginning and thoughts about how to best apply the idea are fluctuant and very dynamic. It’s exciting.
I am currently setting up a team and a page. Once that’s done, we plan sending out a newsletter to test the idea.
If you have ideas, questions, critique, thoughts, suggestions or anything you’d like to share, email me: victoria.schneider@journalism.cuny.edu .
And stay tuned.
