The Acceptable Face of Dictatorships

Back from the Frontline Club - really, really enjoyed tonight's discussion. The panel was fantastic - LSE Professor David Held, Al Jazeera reporter Marwan Bishara, former UK ambassador to Libya Richard Dalton and former Libyan jihadist/current Quilliam analyst Noman Benotman, chaired by BBC presenter Mishal Husein.

The discussion was focused on Libya but fairly wide-ranging and really fast-paced; a lot of time with Q&A type events, audience members can be a bit...long-winded with their questions, spending a lot of time setting them up by outlining their own opinion/experiences. Tonight, though, the questions were very quick, sharp and interesting - none of the soft touch stuff about the role of Twitter.

Anyone who follows me on Twitter has probably already been subjected to my live-tweeting of the event (sorry, work), so I won't re-cap it. But I was very interested in the stuff that came up about Muammar Gaddafi's son, Saif al Islam Gaddafi. I think Saif represents everything that is uncomfortable about Libya for western countries. He was a well-educated, charitable and relatively liberal man who seemed genuinely interested in reform in his country. He was, on the surface, a respectable person to do business with, to accept money from, to partner with. Except, then he wasn't.

This has been the narrative of our political class as well. After Libya dismantled its nuclear programme in 2003/2004, it became acceptable to do business with Muammar Gadaffi again, to pointedly ignore the lack of democracy and the human rights abuses in the country. Sure, Gaddafi was seen as a bit of a nut, but he was endured. Libya was even elected to the UN Human Rights Council just last April. Libya was alright, all things considered, until, of course, it wasn't.

The panel tonight had some polarised views on Saif. David Held opened by explaining his relationship with Said; they had worked quite closely together in the partnerships LSE had with Saif's charitable foundation, and Held said he was appalled by Saif's February 20 speech and shocked by how little it turned out he knew of him. But he also said that Saif had been genuine about the reforms he was trying to implement - that, essentially, it had come down to choosing between his father and everyone else, and he had chosen his father. Richard Dalton said much the same thing - from a British foreign policy perspective, Saif was ideal to deal with and used his foundation to support real issues aimed at genuine change.

Benotman took a less kind but still fairly moderate view, which was a bit surprising for someone who was once actively involved in trying to bring down the Gaddafi regime. He, too, felt that the reforms Saif had been interested in were genuine, but pointed out that they were still meant to be implemented in the context of the Gaddafi regime. Improving democracy or human rights would not, in Saif's view, have in any way involved removing his father from power or giving up control. Benotman said Saif had a choice between the new and the old way, and that he had chosen - historically - to side not just with his father but with the entire old power structure and way of viewing the country, something much more significant than simple family loyalty.

Bishara, though, had the most scathing words for Saif Gaddafi and they really made me think about the way the media portrayed him. He said Saif was a playboy - cosmopolitan, well-traveled, well-educated, yes, but all this and 'charitable' with money that was not his. "He charmed the west at the expense of the Libyan people," Bishara said. There is nothing good or moral about a playboy, and Saif proved in the end that he is his father's son - nothing but the son of a dictator and a thug. Telling here is the fact that I've never in mainstream media heard Saif described this way (well, those exact words I wouldn't expect in an objective article anyway); he's always been seen as the acceptable public face of the Gaddafi regime, as a somewhat liberal, reform type - the way Held and Dalton described him. There's always been talk of his foundation, his charity, and never questions about where that money comes from. After all, what has Saif al Islam Gaddafi ever done to earn the millions he uses to fund projects and aid flotillas, to study at top universities? It was maybe always assumed as obvious that the money came from his father, but never pointed out that Muammar Gaddafi was not from a wealthy family, that the only access to wealth came from his access to the wealth of the state. Like the political class, the western media has now turned on Saif, but at some point it should examine why it was so easy to go along with the acceptable face he presented without question.

On a lighter note, Bishara did compare the Gaddafi family to the Kardashians, saying that he had seen their TV show and saw similarities between the sponging, drunken, playboy brother and Saif - meaning for years the Arab world had been "Keeping up with the Gaddafians".

Media and Protest

I went to a discussion at the Frontline Club last week on whether the mainstream media 'gets' protest and how coverage of protest movements has been affected by social media. The talk had been scheduled ages ago, in the wake of the student protests in the UK over tuition fees and the education maintenance allowance, but since then, Tunisia and Egypt happened, and Bahrain and Libya were on the brink. As a result, the panel included a BBC editor, an Al Jazeera English reporter, the founder of a media website and a student protest organiser. The debate and the questions afterward ended up focusing quite a bit on the role of blogs, Facebook and especially Twitter in organising protests and getting the word out about what's going on.

What I noticed, though, was this. When people talk about the movements in Tunisia and especially Egypt, it is with an air of total hope, pride and agreement. And the mainstream media coverage is in large part responsible for informing that view, for perpetuating it in the way these stories are covered. Aside from a few articles questioning the future of Israeli-Egypt relations should Mubarak's regime fall, there never seemed to be any question in anyone's mind (except Ezra Levant in a February 1 Ottawa Sun piece) as to whether the protests in Egypt were inherently good. Coverage was glowing. Any and all damage or problems were attributed to police, paid Mubarak thugs, unruly elements. Never were the protesters generally described as anything other than great. Which was fine for me, because that happens to gel with my personal view, and I was happy for the Egyptians and Tunisians for what they had done and the future they could now hope for.

But then I thought about what this discussion could have been about if it had happened a month earlier, or if Tunisia and Egypt hadn't happened yet. A discussion about the way the media dealt with the student protests in the UK would not have been this positive. Mainstream coverage of domestic protests almost always focuses on what goes wrong. The biggest stories to come out of the tuition fee protests were the damage at Millbank Tower, the kid who threw the fire extinguisher off the roof of said tower, the attack on Prince Charles and Camilla's car, and Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour's son Charlie's various charges for his involvement. There was no talk of revolution. There was no obvious slant to the reporting that said what the students were protesting for was right or wrong, no tone that made them obvious heroes. There were quotes from protest organisers and student leaders condemning the violence and saying it was caused by a small minority, but this didn't translate into the media coverage in the same way it later would for Egypt. Most people would look at the TV coverage or the newspapers the next day and say, "Look at those students destroying everything." There were citizen journalists, bloggers, Twitter users out there during the protests, posting their views on what was happening, reports and pictures of police brutality or peaceful activity. But there was no media embrace of these people, no big fuss about how Twitter was revolutionising the movement, no scramble to identify the most important bloggers/tweeters and make sure we always had their opinion.

And so, why the difference? Before the Q&A part of the Frontline Club event, and right before my phone died and I lost the ability to follow the livetweeting of it, I tweeted, "Different stories here - does msm romanticise protests elsewhere but vilify them at home?" Then, realising where I was, I decided to put the question to the panelists - between a protest leader, a BBC editor, the CEO of a citizen journalist website and an Al Jazeera reporter with experience in the British media, surely there would be some interesting ideas? People asked many questions about the role of social media, all met with long, thoughtful comments from the speakers. Finally, it was my turn, and I asked about the difference in the way international and domestic protest is covered. Does it have to do, I wondered, with political or corporate agendas, with a plurality of views available, with an inability to identify a definite enemy, with having more reporters on the ground and not needing the Twitter view?

And the answer was...nothing. The question was virtually ignored. The moderator, actually, said it was a great question and commented that as a former foreign correspondent, he could attest to the fact that in foreign reporting you are allowed to sort of "take a view" on things, to decide who are the good guys and the bad guys and report from that perspective. He then deferred to the BBC editor, who shook his head and said he had already spoken a lot tonight. The Al Jazeera reporter said that the question didn't really apply to her as Qatar-based AJ doesn't really have any news. And so, in a joke about the lack of anything happening in Doha, the question was lost and the panelists moved on to the next one. I was disappointed. I had really hoped for some answers on this.

When I got home, I saw a tweet from the BBC editor, responding to my last comment, saying "good point". When I asked him for his views again, he said they were "not for public consumption". The next day, I noticed a discussion between the website CEO and someone who had attended - and the CEO commented that he was more interested by my question than the point they were discussing. You know, the question he didn't say one word about at the debate.

In the end, I was left with two questions. One: what are the factors that contribute to such differences in the way protests are covered at home and abroad? I have some ideas, ranging from the fact that the public's a lot less forgiving about damages when it's their own stuff being destroyed, when it's their city up on the TV screen, to political influences in editorial decisions, to snobbery about the role of citizen journalists, to the need to simplify international problems into good guys and bad in a way we can't do here, to the fact that you just can't get everyone behind hating David Cameron and Nick Clegg in the way you can for Hosni Mubarak. And two: why don't journalists want to talk about it?