A member of the audience during the conversation about women in media in the Middle East wanted to compare the government possibilities in Egypt to Yemen, but Nadia Al-Sakkaf, Editor-in-Chief of The Yemen Times stopped that comparison cold. "It’s not fair," she said. "These are different countries entirely." Throughout the conversation on Monday, March 28 at Club Quarters, the resounding call from Al-Sakkaf and Felice Friedson of The Media Line Ltd., an American news agency specializing in coverage of the Middle East, was for those outside of the region to see each country as a distinct entity, not just a blanket "Middle East."
"What is understood by Americans and anyone outside of the region is a result of media providing that information," Friedson said. "Information is the core of public policy makers and is the key for democracy." She said that one of the oddities of being based in the Middle East is reading accounts of events that are written by someone who is thousands of miles away. "Yet they profess total confidence knowing more than those on the ground."
Friedson also talked about the phenomena of "pack reporting," when hundreds of journalists drop into a country for spot news. "They’re all doing the same story, asking ‘what did that translator say?’ which again supplies an imperfect or incomplete idea that might be widely published with little room for correction, but bound to become conventional wisdom."
Friedson said it’s important that asking legitimate questions, like ‘did we witness a military coup or popular revolution in Egypt?’ is not an indictment of Egypt, nor is giving equal time to the Israel and Palestinian debate. "Adovcates have an ax to grind, but journalists shouldn’t," she said.
Friedson and Al-Sakkaf met over the internet six years ago and Media Line now supplies "content," as Friedson dubbed it, to Al-Sakkaf’s paper, which is published in English.
The Yemen Times was started 20 years ago by Al-Sakkaf’s father, she said he gave his life for freedom of the press. "When I took over in 2005, my staff, half of my male staff, didn’t like it that they had a woman boss," she said. "Yemen is conservative and traditional. Many think that it’s okay for women to be teachers or doctors but they shouldn’t be journalists." She smiled and paused for emphasis to the largely female audience. "So with the power bestowed on me…I fired them." Al-Sakkaf estimated that there are about 500 women journalists in Yemen and many more who do not have press passes and said that half of her newsroom is comprised of women and several foreign reporters from countries like the U.S., Australia and Canada. "I was empowered because my family owns the paper," Al-Sakkaf said. "But it made me wonder what about all the other women who want to make change but their families don’t own the paper?"
Al-Sakkaf asked for the U.S. to empower Yemenites by showing them how to build governmental institutions. "Don’t define our future for us. Don’t send your troops to die in Yemen," she said. "We will fight our own battle." While women are able to run for elected office in Yemen, there is only one woman who occupies a seat in the current parliament that has 301 members. Al-Sakkaf would like to see this change and said she herself would run for a political position in Yemen if a new government is installed. She called the current instability with cries for the current president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, to cede power is at a standstill. "The questions we get from him are: don’t prosecute me or my family and don’t ask me about the money collected for the past 32 years," Al-Sakkaf said, "and we have a problem with that."
In Yemen, the current unemployment rate hovers around 35% and almost half of the population is under 15 years of age. Al-Sakkaf said one of the most critical pieces of legislation for Yemen would be a law for a marriage age threshold. Currently, girls of any age can be married off, considered property of the father to bestow upon another man. One year ago reports of a 12-year-old Yemeni girl who died of internal bleeding following intercourse three days after she was married made international news. The year before that, another married 12-year-old died during childbirth that also killed her baby. Al-Sakkaf said the most powerful person in Yemen is the president and that "if he wanted to do something for women, he would have done it by now. Right now, he’s let me be [at the newspaper], and I hope this continues," she said, with fingers crossed.
Al-Sakkaf and Friedson were asked how social media like Facebook could possibly play a role in the poorest country in the Middle East. "Only one computer is needed," Al-Sakkaf said. "We group together a lot and so word of mouth and SMS [text messaging] spreads to others quickly."
The evening began with music provided by Peter Yarrow, of the group Peter, Paul and Mary, who performed with his daughter Bethany and cellist Rufus Cappadocia. Yarrow is on the board of Media Line Ltd., which is located in Jerusalem.
For videos from the event, go to youtube.com/opcofamerica.