Judas or journalist?

Image by pythonboot via Flickr

I'm not sure how many silver coins are worth a gold one, but let's just put it at 30 for the sake of a decent headline.

It's a fine day when Emirates Business 24x7 is the only newspaper to expose a company that blatantly offers journalists the gift of gold for turning up to a press event, but that's precisely what reporter Dima Hamadeh did today. Her story 'outs' the World Gold Council and its PR company for sending a press invitation that promises all attendees to a WGC media event would receive a gold coin.

When taken to task by Hamadeh, the account manager at the agency responded with: "Why does it offend you? We have done it for years, not only for award announcements but for other events by the WGC as well."

The appropriate note of contrition perhaps lacking there, then...

Another PR person quoted in the story tells Hamadeh that "A lot of journalists call to know what they would be getting as a gift..."

Now that's news to me - in my 12 (grief) years in public relations I have never been asked by a journalist what gift is on offer at an event. In fact, I just checked around the Spot On office, and nobody else has, either. I can tell you that the answer to such a question would be very short indeed.

What on earth is the point of even wasting time talking to a roomful of journalists who have just pitched up to collect their bribe? What's the value of the debased coverage they would give you in their debased media? Besides, if you can own them enough to travel across town and listen to you for an hour for a coin, just send them the damn coin and the rubbish you want them to publish and save everyone some time, no?

The Middle East PR Association, MEPRA, stipulates a limit of $50 for media gifts - set as a reasonable limit for a small gift expected to represent a token of appreciation or thanks. The limit was set in response to a growing culture of outrageous attempts to bribe media, including gifts of consumer electronics such as games consoles, mobile phones and DVD players.

But gold coins are so much subtle, don't you think?

Now. Which publications have covered the World Gold Council jewellery design competition, Auditions? And can their journalists confirm they didn't take the coin?

The New UAE Media Law is .Not. Law

Image by Amy.Ng via Flickr

The New UAE Media Law has been passed by the Federal National Council, according to the Emirates news agency WAM.

The WAM story, filed just now, says that some 60% of the law has been modified, but doesn't say how the law has been modified or indeed whether the controversial 'harm to the economy' clause has been softened or clarified - or whether the 60% modifications were to the version of the law that's being debated or whether they were the original revisions that took place in the two years the law was, to use Gulf News subs' favourite phrase, 'on the anvil'.

We'll doubtless see more on this tomorrow. The law itself has provoked widespread media concern - and it does not, as far as I am aware or can find out, recognise the 'e-world' (for instance bloggers, forum commentators or, say, Twitterers) in any way. So whether you can go to jail for blogging or Tweeting something because you're not a journalist and therefore not entitled to the protection of the law (that protection including huge fines) or not is still totally up in the air. Let alone where a journalist that blogs something stands.

Up until now, the party line has been that regulations will 'clarify' the law. But we haven't yet seen how clear the law, in its final form, truly is. Let's hope that one of tomorrow's papers gets to publish the full draft as approved by the FNC so we can see how the world has moved on since the UAE Journalists' Association published its voluntary Code of Ethics in October 2007...

** As has been noted on this blog before, 'post in haste, repent at leisure'.

Indeed, the new 'law' news from WAM is, as the (sadly) anonymous commenter on this post quite rightly pointed out, not really news. The President has not, as far as we know, signed it off. And so it's not a law. It's just the same old document (unseen) that we've all been waiting for along with some more comments on how it's going to be a wonderful law that we're all going to really enjoy living with. I'm going to hold on getting a red face over this until we see tomorrow's coverage from UAE media. This'll be interesting...

U.A.Q. F.U.N. R.I.P.?

Image via Wikipedia

The news that small and perfectly formed Emirate Umm Al Qawain is to close all bars and nightclubs appears to signal a new, more conservative approach.

It seems to be something of a KT 'scoop', BTW.

Long a favourite weekend haunt for the Lebanese community, UAQ had two 'proper' hotels, a couple of improper hooch-holes and a marina and equestrian club. It also sported the 'UAQ Tourist Club', which evolved from a barasti bar and Friday barbecue joint (run by a quite insane-sounding German person with a white hat) to being a fully-fledged beachside leisure and hotel outfit.

I learned to ride at the Equestrian Club back in the '90s - it was part of the UAQ Marina - a 'dry' entertainment venue, but a pleasant enough place to while away a beach-side Friday. The place was run by 'old school' couple Suzie and Peter Wooldridge, Peter was ex-military and had previously been stationed in the UAE apparently. It will be a very long time indeed before I forget Suzie's posh Brit voice booming across the sandy expanse of the riding school, 'Mexicaaan reeeiiinnss Arleygzaaarndar! Meeeexicaan reiins!!!'.

It was a nice little club and the stables were responsible for rescuing a number of horses, including failed yearlings, rodeo horses and even a couple of shell-shocked Lebanese nutters that had survived Israeli bombardments in the civil war. It was always fun to 'draw' one of those in the 'which horse do I get today' sweepstake. You could tell you were getting a nutter because they had white marks around their necks where they had tried to slip their rope halters during the bombardment - it's a little known fact that brown horse hair grows back white over scarring.

(Don't you learn the most marvellous things from this blog now and then, huh?)

My favourite of all was a 21-year old lippizaner called Samir. A contrary old bastard, Samir had been a beginner's school horse for long enough to know every trick in the book about how to plod around the school at his own pace no matter how much you squeezed or hupped. There were only two ways to get him moving: feed him Pepsi before the lesson or give him a smart crack on the arse with the crop. Some days it'd take both. I'd constantly touch him in the wrong places with my clumsy beginner's feet and end up doing involuntary dressage step dances across the school. The real treat when the weather was good was taking off the saddles and riding the horses bareback into the lovely waters of UAQ creek for a post-ride bathe in the warm, salty water.

They had two camels there called Larry and Alexander that they'd trained to do dressage. Funny.

Back then, a great Friday would consist of a ride out followed by a trip up to the Tourist Club, a barbeque lunch and a beer or two, perhaps a schlep out onto the creek on a jetski or one of the Club's boats and then a toddle home.

And then Suzie and Peter had a falling out with 'authority' and left, Peter selling his Porsche for a knock-down 'quick sale' Dhs 10,000 (always regretted not going for that one). Soon after, the land by the riding school was converted into chalets which always had something of a whiff of sulphur about them. Chalets that appeared to serve a 'certain type' of tourism. I shall say no more at the risk of offending the many sensitive and gentle souls amongst my readers.

I suspect the appearance of those chalets was pretty much when the rot started to set in. The KT news that some '25 nightclubs' were to be involved in the March 1st shutdown order came as something of a shock. 25 nightclubs? In lovely, quiet Umm Al Qawain?

The nightclub cleanup's fine by me, but I do hope they'll be leaving the 'old' outlets there - something that the KT story doesn't clarify.

People used to go up there and enjoy themselves quietly, not distressing, upsetting or disturbing anyone as they enjoyed the beaches and the rich marine life of the huge UAQ creek (turtles, marlin and mangroves).

And nobody, certainly, needed to worry about the provenance of the young lady accompanying you... But then I suppose they were more innocent times, no?

One For The Ladies

Of the many wonderful things to be found in the diverse and rich playground that is the Internet, this is one of my favourite things today. It was advertised on my phone bill and piqued my curiosity because of the whiff of egregious sexism it carried with it.

It's Etisalat's 'My Bouquet' service, a special range of offers for the little lady.

The advert on my phone bill offers the chance to win a pink Blackberry Pearl - because girls only like pink, don't they? Of course they do, lads.

But then we have the actual My Bouquet section of Etisalat's website (Interestingly, if you search eim.ae for "My Bouquet" it doesn't return the service as a result. Nice.), a true phenomenon of targeted marketing. For a start, it's got flowers on it - and everyone knows the girls love a flower every now and then! Especially those ones from Emarat, eh chaps?

"My bouquet is carefully designed to best serve the need of the women" Etisalat declaims on the site, which is illustrated with a (licensed, I hope!) picture of a sappy-looking Nancy Ajram. And how right they are! There are three bouquets, Lilac, Tulip and Orchid, which are perfect for the need of the women.

Lilac lets the women talk internationally for 1.6 hours. Tulip lets the women talk internationally for 5 hours and Orchid lets the women talk internationally for 8.3 hours. There are some reward point thingies and the chance to win that lovely, desirable and oh! So female! Pink Blackberry.

So there you go ladies! Now you can win a pink Blackberry and talk for a long time on the 'phone!

PS: I coloured this post pink especially for the ladies! This segmented marketing lark is a DODDLE once you understand your target audience, isn't it???

Dubai and Negative Media

The recent spate of negative media coverage on Dubai has been an interesting phenomenon to watch on so many levels. Firstly, it has served to polarise opinion in the city itself and people have come together in a surprising and, as far as I can see from friends, colleagues and the like, strongly consensual reaction. The pro-Dubai lobby consists of cynical, snarky and critical journalists, bloggers and Middle Mirdif in general – people who last year queued up to whinge, moan, complain and generally put the boot in wherever possible. I might be accused of being in that company.

A second interesting result has been the way in which those new converts to the Cause That Is Dubai have reacted to the articles. They’ve been commenting on them. A few short years (months, even) ago, they’d only have had the opportunity of writing a strongly worded Letter to the Editor, which would quite likely have been ‘spiked’ by the ‘Reader’s Editor’ – in fact one particularly splenetic Dubai blog is subtitled ‘Because my letters to the editor never get published’*!

Nowadays newspapers have woken up to the Internet and have started to post articles up with a facility for reader comment and feedback. Two** of the worst anti-Dubai rants have run recently in The Guardian, the now infamous Germaine Greer ‘Bus ride’ piece and the more recent, and no less uninformed, Simon Jenkins ‘Ozymandias’ piece which combined ignorance and pretension in a quite charming way. And both have seen their ‘comments’ sections closed after a tide of angry riposte from people that knew a lot more about Dubai than the writers in question. The Guardian has even been forced (I can tell you, most ungracefully) to correct a couple of the more glaring howlers in the Greer piece.

This is important. The Guardian is now arguably little different to Wikipedia – the process of two-way communication and egalitarianism that the Internet is increasingly empowering is starting to change newspapers and the way we consume them - it’s become self-correcting. This doesn’t stop the print edition from carrying the rubbish uncorrected. But nobody’s reading that anymore anyway, are they?

This piece originally appeared as one of the chucklesomely named 'A Moment with McNabb' columns in Campaign Middle East magazine.

* The Real Nick has changed the subtitle of his blog since this article was printed, just to mess me up.

** This was also printed pre-Johann Hari and pre the excellent Chris Saul's parody of Hari's piece, which I do commend to you most heartily.

Wordle

This is a Wordle word cloud of ze blog, found among all the other junk, dross, fascinating stuff and bonkers bits and bobs that clutter the Web thanks to DXBluey.

I am deeply amused by this. But then I have a mental age of 6...

UAE Unblocks flikr?

Image via Wikipedia

There has been much confusion over this one: www.flickr.com remains blocked by the TRA, but you can access the site (well, you could at the time of writing) by using this link (thanks to Nagham!).

However, any attempt to click through to an image results in a block. I used 'trees' as my test subject, as I thought I might as well kick off with something subversive - and got the usual cheery message.

So flickr remains blocked, our little burst of optimism has petered out and life goes on as usual, without the ability to effectively do Yahoo! Image Searches.

Somehow, someone, somewhere (in a very big, secure, server farm in the States, I rather think) has missed a link. But they got the rest of it down pat, thank you very much.

Go home people. There's nothing to see here. Move along, move along...

JG Ballard

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JG Ballard has died, aged 78, following a long battle with cancer.

Ballard's work has long had sway over me. He skittered across styles and genres, producing some of the most compelling fantasy work, The Terminal Beach being one of the first things I came across - a book published in the year I was born and one which has, along with Vermillion Sands, The Drowned World and The Crystal World, stayed with me since I was a kid.

Ballard's world was one of almost frightening, inxplicable desertscapes, jungles and fractally twisted textures, of alternative realities and surreal thought. His worlds were terminal, unsustainable, post-cataclysmic, his human characters always surrounded by, challenged by the destruction wrought by erosion, change and altered states.

From the man that systematically blotted out everything around him, creating a comfortable whiteness (killing his wife in the process) to a man left alone as the only survivor, apart from a shadowy, uncreachable figure that wanders and dances out of his reach) in an earth that has been turned entirely crystalline, Ballard's work was fired by almost incredible imagination.

His work is sometimes, despite being set a million mental miles away from any right-minded person's reality, redolent of its era - try Crash, an early 1970s book that sexualises cars and an obsession with car crashes in a disturbing study of man and technology twisted together in the ultimate bond.

Empire of the Sun was an oddity - the story of his childhood incarceration after the invasion of Singapore, it's autobiographical and probably his only 'straight' work. The Spielberg film of it is awful. The Kindness of Women is another book that sits oddly on a bookshelf containing The Drowned World and Vermilion Sands.

Latterly, his writing shifted to dealing with themes of sex, drugs and death in suburban dystopia. Well, I mean, why not? Cocaine Nights, Super-Cannes and Millenium People would make compelling reading for anyone living in the Arabian Ranches (God, Ballard could have created the bloody Arabian Ranches for all we know) or Green Community, the Greens, Palms or whatevers in The Projects. These are the types of communities he created, populating them with suburban career people whose outward lives masked terrifying cabals of criminality and violence.

I always thought he'd come to Dubai. I'd have loved to have seen his face when he saw the perfect dystopia - somewhere so close to his writing that he'd have been sent into shock, Vermillion Sands and Cocaine Nights intertwined with Crash. I wonder if he'd have liked it, loathed it or just been stunned that we're all living in what was, ultimately, JG's reality.

Anyway, he's gone now. And we've lost an incredible, defining imagination and talent.

Obama's First UN Boycott

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The US government, the Obama administration that sparked such hope (and fear, possibly!) in the Middle East is boycotting the United Nations’ 2009 Durban Review Conference, being held in Geneva from the 20th-24th April because the document that is to form the basis of the conference debate, the Draft Outcome Document, reaffirms the 2001 Durban Declaration. The US together with Israel, is being joined in its boycott by a 'coalition of the willing' that includes Canada and Australia.

The Draft Outcome Document was the result of preparatory committees, meetings and conference proceedings involving the entire United Nations – including the US, which had already negotiated major changes to the DOD before it walked. It is based on the 2001 Declaration which resulted from the 2001 World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, that took place in Durban, South Africa. The US and Israel walked out of that conference, although an overwhelming consensus of world governments and NGOs remained and ratified the Declaration.

The 2009 Conference has the enthusiastic backing of the UN, as does the 2001 Declaration: “The outcome document of the 2001 World Conference, the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action (DDPA), which was adopted by consensus, is the most comprehensive and valuable framework for addressing racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance.”

Many people, including Barbara Lee, who heads the black caucus in Congress, have huge reservations about the Obama administration’s decision. Lee has been widely quoted by media as being deeply dismayed: "This decision is inconsistent with the administration's policy of engaging with those we agree with and those we disagree with… The US is making it more difficult for it to play a leadership role on the UN Human Rights Council as it states it plans to do. This is a missed opportunity, plain and simple."

The offending text from the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action, 2001, is not being quoted in any of the news coverage I’ve seen of the US government decision, particularly not outlets such as CNN. So I thought it might be worth finding out what it actually says that is so objectionable that it would spark a walk-out from a major UN conference. The two extracts below neatly sum it up:

Relevant Extracts from the 2001 Durban Declaration

62. We are conscious that humanity’s history is replete with terrible wrongs inflicted through lack of respect for the equality of human beings and note with alarm the increase of such practices in various parts of the world, and we urge people, particularly in conflict situations, to desist from racist incitement, derogatory language and negative stereotyping;

63. We are concerned about the plight of the Palestinian people under foreign occupation. We recognize the inalienable right of the Palestinian people to self-determination and to the establishment of an independent State and we recognize the right to security for all States in the region, including Israel, and call upon all States to support the peace process and bring it to an early conclusion;

64. We call for a just, comprehensive and lasting peace in the region in which all peoples shall co-exist and enjoy equality, justice and internationally recognized human rights, and security;

65. We recognize the right of refugees to return voluntarily to their homes and properties in dignity and safety, and urge all States to facilitate such return;


150. Calls upon States, in opposing all forms of racism, to recognize the need to counter anti-Semitism, anti-Arabism and Islamophobia world-wide, and urges all States to take effective measures to prevent the emergence of movements based on racism and discriminatory ideas concerning these communities;

151. As for the situation in the Middle East, calls for the end of violence and the swift resumption of negotiations, respect for international human rights and humanitarian law, respect for the principle of self-determination and the end of all suffering, thus allowing Israel and the Palestinians to resume the peace process, and to develop and prosper in security and freedom;


The DOD is the document negotiated in preliminary committees and meetings that will set the agenda for the UN Durban Review Conference debate. It’s perhaps interesting that the Obama administration is sending the clear signal that this stuff is not only considered to be alien to its policies and views, but that it’s not even up for debate.

Terror Alert

Image by Paul Keller via Flickr

So our man, let’s call him Paddy, buys a replica AK47, one of those welded ones that trade in the UK across the counter, openly, for around £80 - the Lord alone knows why, but he does.

Paddy takes the gun to work to show his mates on the construction site (in London) that they're working on and colleague Moikey uses Paddy's mobile to take a snap of yer man goofing around with the gun. Fun had, the fake shooter's pushed under a desk somewhere in the site office and everyone forgets all about it.

Paddy, a strangely avid AC/DC fan, manages to lose his mobile down at the pub one night, about three weeks ago, but thinks no more about it as he's busy at work and has to somehow fit in a hectic schedule of AC/DC gigs. In fact, over the next three weeks he travels to Barcelona and Amsterdam to AC/DC concerts and then goes to New York travelling for work.

Unknown to Paddy, there’s trouble afoot. For Paddy's mobile has been handed in to the polis when it was found down at the pub and they've discovered a photo on it of the owner hefting the world's favourite terror/mafia/mad Afghani Taliban gun - the simple, efficacious and eminently reliable Automat Kalashnikova Model 47. And, to their delight, the owner is... IRISH!

Woken up at 5am yesterday morning by an Armed Response Unit storming his house, torches strapped on guns and all, Paddy was, perhaps a little understandably, bemused. But not as bemused as the (mostly Irish) lads at the site were when another bunch of flak-jacketed, gun-toting heavies pitched up at work today in squad of jam sandwiches demanding that the puzzled team ‘Show them the gun’.

Once everything had been made clear, the temperature dropping to something approaching normal and the orange boiler suits and cable ties put away, one of the coppers who had been ‘looking after’ Paddy during his short arrest did admit that Paddy had been a hell of an expensive guy to follow.

Because for the past three weeks Paddy, the happy AC/DC-mad building lad, has been followed around the UK and across Europe by an increasingly puzzled crack squad of Her Majesty's Finest, intent on uncovering the link to Mr. Big, the Real IRA, the rag-heads or whoever else was behind Paddy, the gun-toting heavy from Dublin, Fair City.

They must have been killing themselves tracking a pissed and cheering Paddy through the crowds at those AC/DC gigs in case he was making contact with the rest of his cell, let alone having to chase him on his inexplicable jaunts across Europe and the States. You can almost see Plod getting all excited as Paddy drives through the grey, damp morning on his way to the ferry, his death's-head cutoff with studded bits and faded denims packed safely in the boot and Highway to Hell booming in the car.

"He's on the move, Sarge! He's off ter Amsterbloodydam!"

The whole stupid incident has all been an incredible waste of time, effort and public money. And all this on the day that a German tourist in London was forced by police to delete the pictures on his camera in case they breached security. The tourist, a former professional news photographer, avers the snaps were not only all completely innocuous, many were of his young son.

We’ve all gone mad, people. Quite, quite mad