Fake Plastic News

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

There's an awful lot of talk about fake news online, a background rumbling that occasionally erupts as indeed it has this week. We have all enjoyed the controversy surrounding the US intelligence dossier that purportedly places the future President of the land of the free and home of the brave in a Moscow hotel room watching gleefully as a number of ladies of dubious reputation perform vengeful lewd acts involving micturating on a bed previously used by the previous President of the LOFTAHOFB.

The fun thing about the story, which is more than likely total bunkum, is how deliciously fun it is. Liberal America would just love to believe it. So would most of us, no?

The trouble is that it's getting very hard indeed to sift the wheat from the chaff. But fake news is nothing new: we've always been rather surrounded by it. Was King Richard III really a vile, drooling hunchback who murdered two little princes? Probably not, but we've been just a tad under 500 years late coming to that conclusion. At the time, the spread of rumour was mostly by word of mouth - Gutenberg had only just invented the printing press and printed his celebrated bible - and so it was word of mouth, together with a wee dose of Shakespearean bile a hundred years later, that was to seal Richard's poor reputation.

Gutenberg's press - and pretty much every innovation in media and communications since - merely accelerated the process.

Richard was just one of a million historic examples of fake news, many of them classic examples of history being written by the victor. Sitting in Dubai, the issue of the Al Qassimi 'pirates' comes to mind - opposed to the invading British, they were quickly labelled brigands and pirates and so, for a good hundred years, the whole area was happily referred to as 'the pirate coast'. My own novels have often played with the idea that my freedom fighter is your terrorist and vice versa.

From Gutenberg to the Internet we see the rapidly evolving role of news media - from the invention of the 'newspaper' through to the era of press barons and the dominance of media by politics and big business. Idealistic journalists have constantly found themselves challenged by repressive forces, from political interference through to commercial censorship, our media has represented a combination of people telling truth to power and power telling lies to people.

We used to depend on those solid journalists and their editors to help us better understand the world around us from an informed viewpoint and we were, up until pretty recently, happy to buy whatever narrative they decided to shape for us. If we suspected any interference behind the scenes, we tended to gloss it over. For our media and governments would never tell us porky pies, would they? Our government, after all, governs in our name, does it not? Represents us? Why, then, would they lie to us?

It's not just governments, of course. Big business loves fake news. Advertising and PR agencies have long placed fake news stories in media. You can spot the weasel words, 'studies say' and 'most folks agree' are just two of many sure-fire signs that studies don't and most folks wouldn't. Palm oil, gun lobbies, Israeli settlers, big pharma selling GMOs to Africa - you name 'em, they've been manipulating news by seeding untruths and obfuscation disguised as surveys, research and expert opinion.

As the Internet has whipped the news cycle into a news cyclone, we have seen the erosion of trust in 'mainstream media' and politics become a dominant force in our society. Last year's two most savage political upsets were arguably driven by public anger and disaffection with politics, following on from the waves of disaffection which washed around the Middle East and made their way to Europe with the riots in Britain and Occupy Wall Street in the US. We've seen growing disaffection with big business, too. That wave of disaffection has moved with blinding speed because of the Great Networks of our age.

In the face of that disaffection, our media has been failing - plummeting revenues and the slow death of print have led to staffing cuts and a growing pressure to keep up with the twin-headed Gorgon of Twitter and Buzzfeed. We need clicks, boys, and we need them fast - realtime if you please.

If you want to see the result of this dual pressure to make old media models perform in the new media age, you only have to wander around the Daily Mail, the world's most popular news website. It's not a terribly edifying experience, especially if you believe (as I do) that we tend to get the media we deserve. The difference between the Mail's mainstream content and the stories in the 'Taboola' tabs is getting frighteningly slim. Real 'news' is starting to mimic fake news.

Making it all worse, alongside these pressures we have the very nature of the Internet. Ubiquitous, always-on, filled with people, animals, trolls and lice and all their spurious motivations and agendas. What would have been irrefutable proof in Richard's day (a letter, say) or Nixon's (a tape, say) is worthless today. We can Photoshop images, edit sounds, manipulate documents and fake testimony.

We can harness the news cycle and network effects to put untrue stuff out there and by the time anyone's got around to saying, 'Wait, what?' it's too late. Site X has run it, sites A-W have picked up from site X in the relentless rush to harvest those early clicks and suddenly the whole Web is full of the Spurious Thing. You can probably correct Site X, but that's about as far as you're going to get in terms of actually slipping a cork in the bottle. By about now you've got yourself a nice little hashtag and you're the talk of the town.

But this all has just democratised demonisation. We've always had fake news. It used to be the preserve of the wealthy, powerful and the victors. Now spotty Herberts in tenement bedrooms can do it. And there are companies out there who are harvesting clicks by the million by intentionally creating alarmist rubbish and pushing it with 'clickbait' headlines. Filtering the truth from the fake these days can be a bewildering game. And most people couldn't be bothered.

Which is, to be honest, a worry...

"With inputs from agencies" - More Copy/Paste Gulf News Shenanigans

Gulf News (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Gulf News' inside front cover story today (flagged on the front cover) will be familiar to anyone who's been online over the past few days - the gang who ripped off tens of millions of dollars from RAKBank and Bank Muscat and the two alleged gang members who photographed themselves with a pile of cash in their car.

It carries a local byline but signs off with a little tag in italics - with inputs from agencies. So what precisely does that mean? Well, as we've seen before with similar GN stories, it means whole wodges of the report are actually not written by Gulf News at all, but simply copied and pasted from the newswires. I have alluded to this practice before. In the case of this story, "Stolen Gulf cash tipped off the FBI", Gulf News has used the text of a Bloomberg report verbatim - in fact, the story from the words "the digital currency company" to the end is Bloomberg's report. It represents a little under half the entire extent of the story.

Much of the rest of it is mostly rewritten or just plain copied from an Associated Press file:

On two pre-arranged days — once in December and again in February — criminals loaded with the lucrative debit cards and PIN numbers, headed into city streets around the world, racing from one ATM to the next, often taking out the maximum the cash machine would allow in a single transaction: $800. In December, they worked for about 2 1/2 hours, reaping $5 million worldwide in about 4,500 transactions. Two months later, apparently buoyed by their success, they hit the ATMs for 10 hours straight, collecting $40 million in 36,000 transactions.
Associated Press (running as "Bloodless bank heist impressed cybercrime experts" in The Guardian)

On a pre-arranged day in December, criminals loaded with the debit cards and PIN numbers, headed into city streets around the world, racing from one ATM to the next, often taking out the maximum the cash machine would allow in a single transaction: $800. They worked for about 2.5 hours, reaping $5 million worldwide in about 4,500 transactions. In February, the gang hit the ATMs for 10 hours straight, collecting $40 million in 36,000 transactions.
Gulf News, "Stolen Gulf cash tipped off the FBI"

So there we go. A story that happened right under Gulf News' nose, covered by cutting and pasting agency reports and the practice justified by 'with inputs from agencies', when in fairness what it really should say is 'with no real input from Gulf News'.

Arab Media Forum Faces New Media Challenges. Shock Horror.

This is in no way a gratuitous plug for the 'book of the blog,' you understand.

This blog, as readers of Fake Plastic Souks - The Glory Years will know, started around The Arab Media Forum 2007. This was mere coincidence, not by any means a result of the forum which I have never attended and likely never will attend. In fact, as the first post attests, we were sitting at home eating Lebanese takeaway.

There seems to be even more intense debate at this year's forum (judging from the reports one sees on Twitter) about the 'role of new media' and all that. It's an interesting debate - some may argue taking place a little late in the day - particularly in this region, where reporting is so very dangerous and the conflicts so very real - and, as all conflicts necessarily are - polarised and messy. Making sense of these things is tough, dangerous and hard - journalism, true journalism, is a thankless and wearying job. But some people are just plagued with that need to delve down to uncover the truth and then get it out there into our hands so we can make more informed judgements about the world around us.

Shame there are all too few of these in the Middle East, but that's the breaks.

The Great Debate, of course, has moved on. It's no longer about whether digital media are relevant, but whether traditional media is relevant. You'd hardly have thought that from the Forum, which includes the session, "Digital Media: Authority Without Responsibility". Apart from a few 'digital heads' the debate at the Forum remains principally analogue and although there are nods to a process of transition, there is no sense that this transition could easily well take the form of disintermediation.

The Forum's first session was, in fact, "Conventional Media vs. New Media" - the program outlines the problem as this:

News industry is remarkably challenged by the emerging “new media” platforms. This synthetic prelim produced unprecedented dilemma for traditional journalism and undoubtedly added more complications.

Quite.

Of course, what the debate lacks is a sense of where humanity's eyeballs are going. Are people consuming as much local media as before? Does it carry as much weight with the public? Is the Arab News media seen as credible compared to online and first hand sources? Where are people going for news these days? Gulf News or the Daily Mail Online?

That research could have underpinned a viable and vibrant debate framed by the scale of the challenge facing print media and the practicses of print media journalism. Events in Syria and even the recent Beirut bombing which I posted about at length here, comparing Twitter to a Lorenzian water wheel, have shown that trying to adapt conventional 'big' media reporting to Twitter and YouTube can have disastrous effects - and have arguably eroded the weight we give to mainstream media. Never has there been more need for careful, considered journalism - and never have we seen so little of just that.

Instead, we have the same old ground being gone over - with a distinct under-representation of the 'new media' everyone is so upset about (although nice to see Maha from Google there). Although it's nice for everyone from the region's media to get together for a chat, I can't help but feel the actual eyeballs have, well, moved on...

Is Mainstream Media DOOMED?

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Does the fact that social media has been leading the coverage of the Iranian protests mean the end of MSM, or mainstream media?

My post yesterday attracted a couple of interesting comments from The National’s Jen Gerson and Insurgency Watch’s Christopher Allbritton. Both are highly respected journalists with ‘form’. Jen’s points also led to a thought-provoking post on her blog last night.

So, to continue the conversation, I thought it might be worth taking their points as a Q&A...

Tonnes of the #iranelection tweets were rehashed MSM coverage
A lot of people were retweeting links to MSM pieces, yes. But if you were following close or primary sources, you were also getting the voice of people on the ground. Some of those voices, incidentally, are suspect. You have to take care over who you’re following and how much salt you take with each report. The skill in that is little more or less than a journalist would use to balance sources – and I do think that many people today have a refined enough news sense and awareness of the Internet to be able to make those judgements by themselves. We're big boys and girls now...

Having said that, a guide to decent breaking news is no bad thing - there are a lot of people out there Tweeting links to things that engaged or amused them - and when you start including hashtags, you have a good contextual stream. If you follow the right people, BTW, you get a better editorial pick than if you follow less acute observers. The choice, you will see, is in who you choose to follow. Same with journalism, same with newspapers. I read Jen because I like her writing and find it insightful. I follow @catboy_dubai 'cos he's a pal and is amusing. I like @deafmuslim because she’s a great writer and quite potty – and challenges my view of things. I choose not to read Germaine Greer any more. I loathe the Daily Mail. My choice of, errr, 'media'.

The awesome pics are from wire services
Images from wire services? Yes, of course. They're the images that most Middle East newspapers will use because they haven't got their own snappers on the ground. So I'll take a Tweet of a Getty/Reuters pic today over waiting until tomorrow

But there were also a lot of important images that weren’t wire service stuff. Like this image, for instance, that struck me so much. BTW, at the moment itself I don’t think we’re looking at sourcing halfway decent images – we’re looking at witness report that tells the story. Quality is not the benchmark.

Verifying information doesn’t mean waiting for a second Tweet. It means calling round sources or being an eyewitness yourself.
Although I am, by dint of my own background as a journalist and writer, minded to agree, I also think we’ve moved on a little. While there is undoubtedly room for sober, reflected, contextual analysis (something we see all too little of, BTW, in our regional media as well as international media) there is also room to take the stream of eye-witness report and form a view from that. If you’re seeing 30-40 people on Twitter saying that police are hitting the rioters hard and then getting Tweets detailing injuries, the flow of events would tend to suggest a measure of reality coming from the ground. Combined with real-time reports from newswires or other sources, you’ve got the story in front of you, but the story presented in a way that no broadcaster can equal – eye witness accounts of events unfolding, real people, real emotion, real reaction.

I do think that MSM often fails to meet that standard of journalistic integrity, BTW. Again, particularly in our region, good, balanced reporting that takes the facts, challenges them and searches for balance, completeness and the three sides to the story (yours, mine and the other guy’s) is often notably lacking.

Disinformation is a problem with crowdsourced media
Agree – because you’re actually in the crowd and so you’re as prone to each new rumour and report that’s coming through. Which is why, going back to your first point, it’s vitally important that we DO have people like Reuters and AP on the ground. Or people like yourself or Christopher. But that’s journalism, not media. I have RSS feeds of the major newswires and get the stories as they break. So I can verify the big stuff – which gives credence to the little stuff. And so I can quickly build a picture of which Twitterers are ‘on the money’ if I want to.

But this comes down to the point, I think. I don’t need CNN or Sky to see what’s happening – in fact, the whole #CNNfail thing was about thousands (tens of thousands) of people feeling strongly that CNN’s editorial judgement was deeply flawed in not affording these events top line coverage. I think many news outfits were unprepared, under-resourced and under-educated on the whole Iran story. So what's better, a young, unprepared cub journalist pitched into covering the Tehran story from the Dubai bureau, or witness reports from on the ground?

By the way, I will never forget seeing journalists in my hotel in Amman reporting 'from the Iraqi border' during the Iraq invasion. Not all journalism is bad, but the really woeful stuff has dented public faith in the credibility of journalism a great deal. And no, I don't like that at all.

Blogging triumphalists don't give us enough credit
I don’t much like the tag ‘blogging triumphalist’, you’ll probably be unsurprised to know. I and many, many other people I know feel that we are not being well served by ‘legacy’ or mainstream media. But it’s the media I’m talking about – not journalism. Journalism online can positively thrive, Christopher himself is a brilliant example of that and I’ll add my two personal favourites, AdNation’s Eliot Beer and mUmBRELLA’s Tim Burrows. Both are former print journalists who have taken their work online and who are part of a richer, faster, more agile and more diverse online media that are winning people’s eyeballs because they give us what we want, how we want it and when we want it.

The crucial difference is that we can select what streams interest us. We can follow the people whose work engages us, whether they’re bloggers, Twitterers, photojournalists, writers or videographers.

And, by the way, one of those streams is wire services – the very same ones that fill the majority of the white space on the dead trees that are shoved into the hotel rooms, houses and offices of disinterested readers all over the Middle East every day. I don’t need to wait until tomorrow to read a watered down version of Reuters’ piece on Tehran, it’s on my desktop in two seconds thanks to RSS. And the pictures, too. AND the eyewitness reports that flesh out my own personal understanding of, and emotional attachment to, what's going on.

Twitter is one part of this emerging new media story, one of the information streams open to us thanks to the Internet. As consumers, we are increasingly using these information streams to customise and streamline the content we believe is relevant to us.

We don’t need translators or people to hold our hands and give us the context that we, poor mortals, are too dumb to seek ourselves. And if that’s journalism’s defence (I do not believe it should be, BTW), then God help journalism.

Meejia

This link came to me thanks to Charles Arthur. It's an amazing blog that charts job cuts in US newspapers. It's looking like carnage out there: US media houses are reporting drops in their profits anywhere from 47 to 87%.

US newspaper advertising, local and national both, dropped by over 7% in 2007, together with smaller drops in specialist magazines, radio and a number of TV categories. The biggest rise in advertising volumes was the Internet, a growth of almost 19%.

UK newspaper sales have dived over 11% over the past four years on average, with year on year drops to April 2008 as high as 10 and 12%, as people move to the Internet for their news, views and conversations.

At the same time, many journalists are also using the 'new tools', including blogs. A survey by Pleon's US partner, Brodeur, showed that over 50% of journalists spent an hour a day reading blogs. Almost 50% of them blog themselves - and 4 out of 5 US journalists believe that blogs have made reporting more diverse. 65% of US media regularly read blogs that cover their area of reporting. We're even seeing a re-birth of media interest in, and reporting of, blogging in the UAE, although I honestly think this article today that quotes a certain devilishly attractive cove could, and should, have gone a lot further.

It's probably no coincidence that the biggest recent influx of journalists from 'more sophisticated' world markets recently to the UAE was to Abu Dhabi's The National - and that there are something like 20 blogs coming out of that team right now, including a 'team blog'. In other words, blogging is part of life for journalists from other parts of the world - online habits are ingrained in them that are perhaps lacking in our regional media - but that's changing fast.

If you doubt that change, read this (courtesy Gianni)...

What on earth am I getting at? Well, there's a movement going on here. As consumers' eyeballs are moving online, the money's following them. And media houses are being dragged along behind the money, trying to find new revenue streams that will replace the advertising and copy sales revenue of the 'conventional' media model. It does remind me of the struggles of circuit-switch mentality telecom operators trying to deny the existence of the virtually free of charge Internet telephony. And the typesetters I used to work with who didn't believe that desktop publishing would replace professional compositors. And the people at travel agent Thompsons who lost their jobs to people like me who book holidays on the Internet. And on and on and on.

The list is, of course, of people being disintermediated by the Internet. And media in key world markets are facing that self same pressure right now. To misquote Larry Ellison, "It's online business or out of business". The problem is that online revenue streams aren't acting like conventional revenue streams - and there's a shortfall in revenue that's behaving conventionally.

This, therefore, would seem to be a time to behave unconventionally...

Points

There’s an Egyptian Arabic language website and accompanying newsletter called Egypt ICT, which provides news, views and commentary on that most excellent country’s burgeoning ICT scene. Recently it’s been the centre of an outbreak of PR/journalist angst which has proven most fascinating, reporting on a series of events that appear to have sparked a new, well, grumpiness on the part of the country’s press corps.

Back in June, the newsletter gleefully reported a series of gaffes on the part of mobile phone company Nokia. A spat over the apparent exclusion of a number of journalists from a press event appeared to create significant ill-feeling amongst the media there. This was then followed Nokia’s communications people in Egypt apparently suggesting to a rather ungrateful Egyptian media that they might like to conform to a new points based system for rewarding compliant journalists. Points were allegedly to be awarded in return for coverage and journalists who collected lots of points would have privileged access to Nokia executives.

The howl of protest that accompanied this move has still not died down: journalists are, I venture to suggest somewhat gleefully, attacking Nokia and, increasingly, its products in the Egyptian media.

Now the outbreak of grumpiness has crossed over into that most delicate of relationships: that between PRs and journalists. An invitation has been sent out to Egypt’s PR fraternity (‘the marina boys’ in the invitation: a reference to the fact that PRs are seen as yahoos from the yacht club) that offers them a training course in writing media releases and other materials in ‘decent’ Arabic.

It would appear that battle lines are being drawn and that there is going to be some fun to be had out of this. Long abused, disrespected and neglected, Egypt’s journalists have often created a rod for their own backs because it is all too easy to ‘buy’ coverage – either through paying the paper directly or a journalist indirectly. There are, don’t get me wrong, decent and scrupulous journalists in Egypt who do not do this.

It would appear, however, that the money is no longer enough. It looks like the sheer disrespect accorded Egyptian journalists has finally become too much. Companies beware!

Media Regulation and Freedom in the UAE

Sorry, this is a long post.

There was another scurry of activity in Dubai last night as media gathered for a meeting with HH General Sheikh Mohammad and Sheikh Abdulla Bin Zayed Al Nahan last night. The news of the gathering, which ran big in media here today (with, oddly, the exception of Emirates Today), revolved around further clarifications of the position regarding the rights and responsibilities of media in the UAE. That position was certainly made clearer on the news that the UAE Journalists' Association had put forward a voluntary code of conduct which has been adopted by the leading daily newspapers in the country. That code is given below in full.

Although by no means the entire story or solution, the code is presumably an attempt to move in the direction of a self-regulating media. That attempt comes prior to the publication of the much anticipated new media law, which may well render the code of conduct redundant on many points. In the meantime, there is at least a level of guidance now available for journalists and others working in the UAE media industry.

The below text is a cut and paste of that available at Gulf News' website. I do find it interesting that the focus is consistently not on the rights, roles and credibility of journalism, but on what journalists should not do and how they should not behave or act.

The desire to reconcile a belief in media freedom and a capable media together with attitudes and requirements of a conservative, albeit highly tolerant, society in a region where media freedom is at best patchy is not an easy thing to manage. It is a process I have seen developing for something like 20 years now and it's like watching Eensy Weensy Spider...


The Code of Ethics

The undersigned, board members of the Journalists Association and editors in chief of newspapers and publications, and out of belief in our responsibility towards the public and society, and the basis of journalism, on top of which is commitment to the truth and principles of freedom, justice, values, ethics and respect of law, approve the “Journalism Code of Ethics" and undertake to:

1. Respect the truth and the right of the public to have access to the true and accurate information.
2. While performing his duty, the journalist is demanded to commit himself at all times to the principles of freedom and integrity in gathering and publishing stories. He should also voice fair and neutral comments and criticism.
3. A journalist must only publish facts from sources known to him, and must not hide any basic and important information, forge facts of falsify documents.
4. He should use only legitimate means to obtain information, photos and documents from original sources.
5. Publishing news and information of pictures must be examined carefully for accuracy, and their true meaning must not be altered by editing, title or photo comment. All documents must be edited accurately, and any uncertified reports, rumours or speculations must be reported as such. If re-edited or reproduced material was used as a symbolic picture, it should be made clear through the comment that it is not a documentary picture.
6. Journalists undertake to rectify any published information that proved to be wrong and harmful to others.
7. There should be no compromise in credibility.
8. Respecting privacy is a main principle in the profession and journalists should respect the privacy of individuals and not expose it by publishing any thing without the consent of those individuals. If personal conduct over crosses with public interest, such conduct may be covered without violating the personal rights of uninvolved individuals.
9. In regards to the news source, the code and charter stress that Professionalism and confidentiality should be strictly observed if the source demands anonymity. The journalist has every right to present evidence or expose their source without the source’s consent.
10. Journalists should not seek to provoke or inflame public feelings by any means or use means of excitement and deception or dishonest reporting. They should not use media organs for purpose of libel or slandering.
11. The edited publications should not be influenced by personal interests or businesses with a third party. Publishers and editors-in-chief must turn down any such attempts, and draw a clear line between reported stories and commercial articles or publications.
12. Journalists should be very vigilant to traps of discrimination and avoid involving themselves by any means in any stories hinting to discrimination of race, sex, language, faith or national and social backgrounds.
13. They must be aware that a suspect is innocent until proven guilty, thus names and photos of suspects should not be published until a final verdict is issued.
14. In crimes and issues dealing with children, names and photos should not be published.
15. Journalists must be very careful in their personal relationships with news sources so as these bonds can not impact the Partiality.
16. The media should refrain from publishing photos of brutal violence and respect the feeling of the public especially children.
17. Journalists are urged to avoid using offending and obscene language in their reports.
18. Islam is a basic and important component of UAE culture, values and traditions, and the respect of divine religions and traditions and values of nations takes centre stage at the mandatory code of ethics of the media and should not be offended or desecrated by any forms.
19. Human rights should also be respected and valued and should not be abused by the media under any pretext.
20. Plagiarism, ill-intention interpretation, libel, slandering, censure, defamation, allegation and accepting bribery to publish or hide information are all dangerous professional violations.
21. When using facts published by competitors, journalists must give credit to the competitor.
22. Competing for news, pictures and information is a right, provided practicing such competition is honest and clear and does not hinder the work of colleagues in competing publications.
23. A journalist has to do his best not to become part of a story, and to cover news not make them. While gathering information, a journalist may not present himself as anything other than a journalist.
24. Coverage of medical cases must not be sensational, as this can lead to spreading fear or unrealistic hope among readers. Publishing the first stage of results of researches and medical achievements must not be portrayed as final and undisputed.
25. Journalists must not acquire information or pictures through harassment, temptation or violence.
26. Accepting valuable cash and kind gifts may cause a journalist to be biased in his coverage and is considered breach of the code. This does not apply to souvenir gifts given to the public.

Cry Freedom!

His Highness Sheikh Mohammad bin Rashid Al Maktoum, vice-president and prime minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, yesterday issued instructions that journalists were not to be jailed for doing their work.

This news leads every newspaper in the UAE today and rightly so, because it is important news and a huge step forwards. The news, incidentally, followed two days after the announcement that two Khaleej Times journalists were to be jailed for libel.

Interestingly the newspapers were all silent on the subject the day after the libel case was announced. All apart from Emarat Al Youm, the Arabic language daily newspaper published by government-owned Arab Media Group, which also publishes the English language Emirates Today. Emarat Al Youm published an excoriating three-page piece on media freedom in the UAE, detailing issues and investigations that had been faced by many of the dailies published in the Emirates.

Emirates Today, silent on the issue of media freedom yesterday, takes great pains to splash the Sheikh Mohammed today - and to claim the credit for the move coming after its 'sister newspaper condemned the decision to imprison two journalists... the report categorically criticised the sentencing of two journalists...'

And so it did, but many will find Emirates Today riding on the back of the widely recognised strong editorial standards of its Arabic 'sister' paper just a little rich.

There's some interesting ambiguity in the reports. Making the announcement, Sheikh Abdullah Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, chairman of the National Media Council (NMC) said that no journalist is to be jailed for reasons related to his work, adding (according to Gulf News which is itself very careful to attribute the quote to WAM, the national news agency) that there are 'other measures that may be taken against journalists who break the press and publication law, but not jail.'

If you want to wade through it, then here's a link to a copy of that law. It's a fascinating read if you're anything to do with media in the region and is in PDF format.

The KT case, if it was heard under the publishing law (likely as the case was brought by the public prosecution and looks like it might have followed an earlier civil case in which KT was exonerated) appears to have been an argument between article 47, which permits the quotations of arguments and pleading which take place in the courts and article 79, which prohibits publishing details of an individual's private life. I may just be wrong there, it's difficult to tell because of the paucity of information in the media reports of the trial.

If we are reading the announcement about the publishing law right, this would also mean that the stipulated one to six month jail terms for offences under clauses 71 to 85 (too numerous to reproduce here, but worth looking through, believe me!) are also out. And that's really interesting.

The press and publication law is due to be replaced by newer legislation. However, it has to be said that this new legislation has been awaited for a long time - arguably since the announcement that Dubai Media City was to be established.

The two KT journalists have been freed on bail. It is only to be hoped that their case will, indeed, be covered by this directive and that this is a step on the road towards a more open media. However, the new media legislation - a huge task and a complex one - is really going to define that: as is the way it is implemented by the courts.

Incidentally, Gulf News' editorial today rumbles on about press freedom and makes the point that Sheikh Mohammed's move proves that the press truly is the fourth estate. I found that interesting, as here in the UAE it is not the fourth estate nor could it be. So that was a silly thing to say, wasn't it?

Aquafina - Artificially Mineralised Water, Anyone?

Aquafina is a bottled water that's sold in the UAE. It's one of a couple of strange sidelines operated by Pepsico, the people that bring you carbonated water, sugar, phosphoric acid and caramel under the brand Pepsi Cola. They also produce a brand of basmati rice sold in the UAE, for some bizarre reason.

Aquafina has been outed by US based action group Corporate Accountability International, which has been making something of a song and dance about the fact that water from public sources is being bottled by companies branding what is effectively tap water masquerading as spring water. Their point, a fair one really, is that selling tap water under brands that reinforce a strong association with purity, freshness, mountains, green hillsides and all that sort of stuff is misleading. It has to be said that they're not really that worried about the stuff we buy here in the UAE - water under the Aquafina brand is sold in the USA and, we can safely assume, a rather larger volume of the stuff is shipping over there than here.

There is a fine distinction involved here. Water sold as spring water or mineral water must come from a natural source. But Aquafina is not sold as spring water. It is sold as 'pure drinking water'. I'd always assumed it was a by-product of purifying the water needed to produce the Middle East's favourite cola, 'Bebzi', but apparently not.

Pepsico's UAE franchisee, Dubai Refreshments, has moved swiftly in reaction to the 'Aquafina is tap water' charge by arranging a press trip to its facility in Dibba to show press that Aquafina is sourced from underground and is not tap water. The press duly turned up and were taken around the factory and the report is in today's media. They were shown 'two wooden boxes with pipes leading from them', assured by the manager that this was an underground source and handed a statement from the Dibba Municipality that asserts that the water is produced from an underground source inside the premises of the factory.

In a moment of magically skewed messaging, the manager of the factory assured media that "Even the water in our toilets is from the wells."

The end of Gulf News' report is, I think, the most telling part of the story. To quote GN, whose story is linked here (and which I highly recommend, just so you can read between any lines you might find in the carefully worded statement from the Municipality): "...the water's total dissolved solids (TDS) can be anything from 400 to 1200 parts per million (PPM) when it is first pumped but this is reduced to nil before salts and minerals, provided by Pepsico International, are injected in the water. The final TDS count in Aquafina is 120ppm." (My italics, BTW)

Funnily enough, the claimed TDS count on Aquafina's label is 110ppm. Putting that discrepancy aside, we have a water that is labelled, similarly to mineral waters, with its mineral content displayed on the label. But we now know that this mineral content is added by the bottler to water that has been treated to remove a high content of dissolved solids.

The question of source is almost irrelevant now: Gulf News' report makes it clear (although not as clear as some may have liked or expected) that Aquafina is treated water that has been artificially mineralised. But what interests me is that the media didn't do the one thing that would get to the bottom of the question of Aquafina's source and purity for once and for all: take it to a lab and have it analysed.

My pal Scott, a qualified chemist, worked in a testing lab here in the Emirates for a couple of years and would only ever drink Masafi. It was the only bottled water in the Emirates, he used to say, that contained what it said it contained on the label. I've tended to go with that advice myself...

Mabrouk Alan Johnston

Truly great news today, which broke at 2am so all the papers in the UAE missed it.

The slideshow of his release on Yahoo! is worth checking out - a smile that only a man who had been locked in a darkened apartment and threatened with death for four months could smile when he finally came out into the light.

A nice start to the day...

Dope

The working week ends and the Arab Media Forum's award-winning journalists are off back home or back at work today with a big awardy thing to put in the glass cabinet in the corner of their offices. After two days of calling for more training, education and freedom for media, everyone's pleased that it all went off so well and that the important issues have all been well and truly highlighted.

Meanwhile, undebated by the Forum, two journalists from an Arabic language daily are defending themselves in a court in Abu Dhabi after two local 'dignitaries' sued them for defamation. They had reported, says Gulf News, that the dignitaries had been stripped of a racing award after their horse had failed a dope test. Their lawyer presented the doping report to the court, as well as the 'international sporting court's ruling' that stripped the 'dignitaries' of the award their horse had won: arguably evidence enough for the case to be instantly dismissed. Perhaps interestingly, the 'dignitaries' are claiming that the 'suspects' intended to malign them because they published the story on the front page and not the sports section, according to the dignitaries' lawyer, quoted by GN.

Tabloid magazine, anyone?