Spotlight on: Yaara Bou Melhem
“I’m always looking for the silver lining, for someone who’s fighting against a problem in an interesting, innovative way,” says the 2019 Freelance Journalist of the Year.
2019 Freelance Journalist of the Year
Yaara Bou Melhem, Witness, Al Jazeera English and Foreign Correspondent, ABC, “Maria Ressa: War on Truth” and “The Oasis”
This year Yaara Bou Melhem became the first person to win our Freelance Journalist of the Year award twice, having previously taken out the title in 2016. The judges applauded Yaara’s courage, bravery and sensitivity:
“Both of the films Yaara Bou Melhem submitted offer optimistic perspectives on issues that usually leave audiences in despair. The journalist intimately and sensitively captures the struggle of women in oppressive situations. In The War On Truth, Bou Melhem follows Maria Ressa’s global battle against disinformation amidst several legal challenges against her and her news organisation Rappler, whilst capturing Ressa’s humour, hope and relationships.
“In her second film, The Oasis, Bou Melhem manages to do what few journalists have done by capturing a narrative that offers hope in Syria. With almost unprecedented access Bou Melhem portrays a Kurdish-majority governance structure that gives women equal representation in areas previously controlled by ISIS. With her small team, and little security, Bou Melhem risked a lot to capture the real anxiety of the women on the ground in Syria.”
We spoke with Yaara about how she found these stories and what led her into journalism.
How did you find this story?
I’d been reporting out of Syria from before the Arab uprising began in 2011. I suppose there was a period where I stopped reporting on Syria, just because I didn’t think there was any impact that could come out of just documenting the daily grind. For better or worse, I think it is important that we’re there as observers and to document what is going on but I got fatigued by it all.
Then I came across what the Kurdish authorities in northeast Syria had been doing, and it was completely different to the narrative you often hear about the Syrian wars. Something that gave hope, a bit of optimism, that out of war can come these opportunities.
So I was there at the time when the Kurdish-led forces were conducting their very last campaign against ISIS in their territories, and managed to also work in the democratic experiment that authorities were trying to institute in northeast Syria. I also wanted to bring in the fact that they had equal representation of women in their form of governance, and also try to represent what young people were thinking, who grew up in a time where war just seemed endless. I was able to work in a Kurdish wedding — a wedding in a war, I really liked that combination, because there is humanity and a bit of hope for the future.
With Maria Ressa, I was looking for someone who is doing something around disinformation, because I think that is one of the biggest challenges of our time, especially for journalism. Our traditional gatekeeping role, of what facts are, what truth can be, is being challenged by disinformation and misinformation campaigns.
I suppose what I found interesting about Maria is that she’s not only a victim of disinformation campaigns, very heavily targeted by the Duterte regime, but she’s also someone who’s working very closely with the tech giants to stop disinformation campaigns. She had been able to map the architecture of how disinformation campaigns occur. Because of that, she can stop them.
She’s the perfect person to tell this story about disinformation, very much a story of our time, and how we can come out of it. And again, offer an optimistic narrative, that there are people who are challenging the status quo. It comes at a very personal cost to Maria, so I worked that into the story. You see her motivations, what’s at stake for her, and what’s at stake for all of us.
You mentioned optimism a few times, and that was something the judges were struck by with your pieces. Did you seek out stories that did go against the expected narratives of hopelessness?
Absolutely.
I’m always looking for the silver lining, for someone who’s fighting against a problem in an interesting, innovative way. To offer a way out of seemingly dark, complex, unsolvable problems. Otherwise I do think it’s easy for people to switch off and feel despair, that things cannot be changed. I don’t believe that’s the case. Maybe I’m not bitter and cynical enough just yet. But it’s not all doom and gloom.
I can see why people would think that the Syrian crisis is one of those areas where people are just going to switch off. And that’s why I’ve come at it from a very different way. It took me a while to find a story like that, which is why I hadn’t been reporting out of Syria for some time.
With disinformation, I think the work Maria is doing is incredible. I couldn’t believe it wasn’t more widely publicised. At the time that I had been following her, she hadn’t received the TIME Person of the Year honour yet, she hadn’t been arrested just yet. She was high profile in journalism circles, in the circles of people who are working against disinformation. But only this year has she exploded into this figure who’s at the forefront of the fight against disinformation.
I don’t think many people know how she fights against disinformation and how other people can learn from her. I’m going to continue to follow Maria for a feature documentary, and a one hour for Al Jazeera English, to continue to follow her very personal battle and also to look at how she’s operating and working with tech giants in order to stop coordinated disinformation campaigns.
Do you think as a freelancer you have more freedom to look for stories with a different narrative? Because you’re not operating within a newsroom you might think about things a little differently?
Yes and no… I think freelance journalists only have as much freedom as the editors who commission them allow them to have. So it’s all about how you frame things. It’s up to each individual journalist — and their editors or executive producers —to decide whether they’re going to look at something from an angle of ‘yes, there are these major problems but what are people doing about it’.
I think all my stories, especially on complex and seemingly intractable issues, I always look for that silver lining, or that person who’s doing something interesting to at least tackle it. I don’t think that instilling a sense of despair is constructive.
So I always want to leave a bit of hope for audiences because despairing about an issue or problem, as though it can’t be solved, is as bad as not knowing about the problem or denying it exists. I always look for that person, individual or group, who is tackling the problem.
What did it take to get this story up?
Syria is obviously an active war zone. So there were quite a few hoops at the ABC to jump in order to get our clearances to go in the first place, working out security. I also didn’t want to bring in any foreign security contractors as a personal preference, I think that would have made us more visible. I had a good network of fixers and local security operators in Syria who I was able to work with to ensure that we were all safe. It was a very well-constructed security plan, but you’re only ever creating contingencies, you can’t actually predict everything that might happen.
Going to the war zone was almost the easy part, because you know what the risks are and you plan for that accordingly. It’s going to the quieter areas where the unexpected could happen, the things you can’t predict. That’s probably where we were more nervous.
For instance we went to Baghuz, the last stronghold of ISIS. It was very well planned by Kurdish-led security forces, they provide companies that provide security. It’s still quite risky, but a managed risk. Then you’re going to another city, like Raqa, which has in theory been taken back from ISIS but there are sleeper cells there who are still operating. That’s where I found that our local security were a lot more nervous.
There had been quite a bit of media already out on Maria when Al Jazeera and I were discussing how to profile her. What we wanted was something more intimate, a lot more personal. It was all about access with that film.
Both of these stories took a lot of time and planning to execute, because we had to move a bit more slowly. I suppose that is a bit of a luxury. I don’t know if it would have been different if I was working as a staff journalist somewhere and had to churn out a particular amount of stories a year.
All journalists compartmentalise the quick, run-and-gun stories that will satisfy their editors and give them runs on the board, and then there are the slow burns. Like these.
I suppose I made a conscious decision over the past year to just work on slow burns. I’m fortunate enough to be able to do those for editors who know my work and are happy to trust that I’ll deliver.
What impact did your stories have?
For the Syria story, I got so much feedback about the women in the story. Raqa, the former capital of the ISIS caliphate, is now run by two mayors, one male, one female, and the female is a civil engineer heading up the reconstruction.
She’s completely gung ho. I was in that city wearing a scarf, she didn’t care, she’s got her hair out and she’s wearing a leather bomber jacket and skinny jeans, walking around shaking the hands of men working on the construction sites, commanding their respect without an issue. I think that was quite telling of how far the city had come since being retaken. I think that visual image, that metaphor, of seeing someone like her, her name was Leila Mustafa, really struck a chord with a lot of people.
As for Maria Ressa, now we’re getting support to turn this into a feature documentary. More people want to hear about her story. I think Maria Ressa really appreciated the film because I captured a period in time where things were in flux, and I captured her with her team. Her team is one of her primary motivators, she’s very much trying to protect her team from the legal challenges she and Rappler are facing.
Impact is a hard thing to measure. I still think journalists are figuring out how to measure it. The film industry are much better at working on impact campaigns and measuring impact than journalists are, simply because we don’t have the time and resources to do it. I think we do have something to learn from the documentary and film world in terms of collaborating with impact partners to make sure our stories get as wide a reach as possible.
Al Jazeera partnered with YouTube to have the Maria Ressa film premiere as it went to air, and I was online to answer any questions. The irony of all that was a lot of the people who did come online to comment were trolling. It was quite extraordinary. Before I put the film to air Maria said to me “be prepared for the trolling you’re going to get. It’s standard.”
What made you want to be a journalist?
I just always wanted to be in the know. I was extremely curious.
We’re really fortunate that we are given a licence to be really nosy and ask uncomfortable questions that you would never ask someone at the dinner table.
So it’s purely satisfying my curiosity, but I also think we’ve got an immense responsibility not just for our own curiosity but to get to the bottom of things. I really enjoy being a journalist.
What’s your message to Australians about why quality journalism needs their support?
If you don’t support quality journalism you’re just going to get disinformation.
This is not about quality journalism any more… This is about making sure that our democratic processes are upheld. Because without having the right information, we can’t make the best informed decisions. This is about the public’s right to know.
And you don’t get that with disinformation and misinformation and the very powerful groups who know how to manipulate the algorithm, and have bought the data on citizens, in order to know how to push your buttons: to get us to vote in a certain way, to get us to buy certain products, and in order to hide certain information from people.
Journalism now is about countering that.
Yaara Bou Melhem is an intrepid independent journalist and filmmaker. Yaara’s films include exclusive reports where she crawls through Syrian rebel-held tunnels, films in remote Aboriginal communities on taboo subjects like youth suicide and reported more uplifting stories about doctors giving free health care in Nepal and conservation efforts in New Zealand. She is currently directing an observational documentary about Maria Ressa as she battles against disinformation and the undermining of democracies worldwide. Yaara has won two UN Media Peace Awards, accolades from the New York Festivals Awards, a Hong Kong Human Rights Press Award and Walkley Awards for her films.
Follow Yaara on Twitter: @YaaraBouTV
Freelance Journalist of the Year is supported by Media Super
