Serving our home through journalism
While in my home country ISIS continues to wage war on journalists or anyone who says anything outside of their own philosophies, here in the United States journalism continues to flourish, opening doors for new voices, as is the American tradition.
It’s true that many minority groups in America don’t get the air and press time they deserve. This is especially the case for Arab-Americans, who feel misunderstood and regularly misrepresented by Western intellectuals and media. This creates a huge obstacle in the way of reaching a mutual understanding, where both parties could greatly benefit.
But it is also true that in the United States there is an opportunity for people to break the mold without risking their lives. Here, an association of black journalists “welcomes” an Iraqi-American journalist like me, because what they see and appreciate in each other is the heart of journalism, which is an appetite for truth and education, an appetite that journalists in many other countries cannot bring themselves to quench.
On October 11, at the 2014 NABJ Conference in Detroit, sitting on the panel alongside award-winning Fox News reporter Charlie LeDuff and Detroit Free Press reporter Marlon Walker, he listened to the easy and spirited way in which they talked about how they treated “Conflict in the community,” the topic of our discussion, I realized that a big part of the problem many Arabs and Middle Easterners have is internal conflict. Born and raised under authoritarian regimes, they have a hard time expressing their truths constructively. Instead of influencing public opinion and government policy, they try to influence each other, often leading to tension within their own communities rather than progress.
Investigative journalism is such a phenomenon in the Arab world that Amman, Jordan-based Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (ARIJ) describes it on its website as “still an alien practice.” My friend, the renowned poet Dunya Mikhail, was a journalist in Baghdad during the Saddam era. In his book Diary of a wave out of the sea, writes about witnessing the price two editors-in-chief paid for failing to live up to Uday’s (Saddam’s son) ideals. Feeling threatened by her writing, she fled the country to come to the United States.
Many journalists from that region who, growing up, were told “Shut up!” and “Mind Your Own Business” have wounds to heal before they grow wings like American journalists told to “Speak up!” and “Dig for the Truth,” who, like Charlie LeDuff, can confidently say, “This is my home too! We all live in the United States and share it.”
It is when the people of the Arab world, who over the last decade have become one of the fastest growing ethnic groups in the United States, fully understand, appreciate and believe in the words “This is my home too!” that we will best serve this house through journalism.
“Courage in journalism is defending the unpopular, not the popular.” Gerardo Rivera