Gulf News’ intrepid reporting in Eirtrea 21, April 2010
Posted by thegulfblog.com in Horn of Africa.Tags: Arab journalism, Dubai goes legit, Eritrea, Gulf journalism, Gulf NewS
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I’ve stumbled upon a nice little blog by a guy who freelances for various newspapers and magazines. I found it via his recent piece in FP ‘Dubai goes Legit’ which I heartily recommend. Yet it is a later article that caught my eye, one where he lambasts Gulf News, a favorite hobby of mine.
I have been quite vocal (verbal?) in my criticisms of Gulf News. My main problem is that it functions as a PR vehicle for the Dubai government and the quality of its writing and analysis is terrible. However imagine my surprise when I saw this headline online. “Eritrea denies training rebels for Iran, Yemen”.
A real story about a real issue with regional significance. It seemed too good to be true. Sadly it was. As soon as the second paragraph, I knew I was in familiar GN territory.
“Gulf News was given exclusive access to the military facilities and this correspondent toured the war-torn country and did not find any evidence of training for foreign fighters.”
What a shocker. GN was chaperoned around the most repressive country on Earth and did not find any training camps. What would the alternative be? That they did find evidence? This story should have been killed from the start, and whatever Abdul Nabi Shaheen’s credentials as a journalist, he most likely has limited experience a military inspector.
The low point in the whole tired exercise is this sub-head:
GULF NEWS WINS WHERE UN TEAM FAILS: A VISIT TO JABEL RAS DOUMEIRA:
Gulf News wins!!!! The UN loses!!!!! Actually journalism loses and GN’s reputation as being purveyors of nonsense wins too.
To recap: Eritrea is one of the most brutal regimes on the planet – they are not going to bring any journalist to a site where anything untoward is going on. This is so blindingly obvious, yet somehow GN is acting as if it has scooped the world. It hasn’t, it has just regurgitated the propaganda of Afewerki’s government.
The Gulf blog 
One could I suppose make a similar comment about some prestigious and credulous Western media in the run up to March 2003.
Aluminum tubes, yellow cakes.
A perfectly fair point. Keeping me honest, as ever.
[…] Not only is the standard of Middle Eastern journalism fairly abysmal [as I've argued here, here, here and here] but given the youth bulge in many Middle Eastern societies not to mention the […]