Gulf News' Greenwash

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Today's Gulf News, weighing in at a record low 400g incidentally, carries remarkable exercise in hypocrisy.

The newspaper's front page is a clarion call and exhortation to us all to save our planet. This comes from a consortium of 56 newspapers in 45 countries, all of whom have made the same mistake of assuming that we are paying them to nag us rather than provide us with the news, analysis and context that we are told we can expect from our newspapers.

Rather than run this extraordinary editorial on a wrap-around (for instance, seeking sponsorship to offset the additional cost), Gulf News has instead decided to sacrifice the front page entirely, leaving us with today's lead story being the page 3 report on the UAE's prevalence of childhood tooth decay.

Perhaps I am being far too critical and grumpy, but the exhortation to save the planet sat oddly with me, coming as it does from a medium comprised of dead trees. In fact, even today's slimmed down Gulf News consumed something like 46,000 kilos of paper if we are to apply the paper's 2008 BPA audited circulation of 115,000 copies. That's knocking on 17 thousand tonnes of paper per year - and at GN's 2008 weight of 1.2 kilos, we'd have been looking at a whopping 50 tonnes of paper, not including all those fascinating supplements on air conditioning, Malta and Peridontal Marmoset Splicing that brighten up GN's readers' lives.

If all of the newspapers in the global 'we're running an editorial that calls on our leaders to be more green' group have the same pagination and run as GN (and many, incidentally, have a significantly higher pagination and run), their daily collective impact on the planet is the consumption of over two million kilos of paper - a commodity that is made out of dead trees.

If Gulf News had offset its carbon, I'd be more willing to bear with the self-righteous finger-wagging. If it had made any contribution whatsoever to research or 'green' charities , I'd be inclined to admiration (and no, I don't consider a one-off stunt of circulating printed jute bags to subscribers as being significant or even terribly helpful). If it had made a commitment to recycled paper, soy-based inks or other 'green' technologies, I'd be more willing to listen - although I have to note the editorial actually contains very little original or even interesting content that advances the debate it professes to contribute to.

But no, none of the above apply. Gulf News has instead contented itself with taking away a lump of the news that I have paid for and substituting it with a rambling piece of poorly hashed together pompousness that truly beggars belief.

Printed. On. Dead. Trees.

Internet Worse Than Smack Shock Horror

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I know, I know. Barely a post in two weeks and now here I am flooding the damn blog. But Gulf News today contains so much joy that I feel I have to share...

A story on Internet addiction graces The Newspaper That Tells It Like It Is today. 'Forget H1N1, it's all about the smartphone virus sweeping across universities these days' squawks GN in an article that reveals many shocking truths about today's young people, including the fact that they are looking up questions in class using their BlackBerries. Good God! What is the world coming to? What we need around here is a good dose of National Service, I'm telling you!

The piece (linked begrudgingly here) contains a neat questionnaire designed to test whether or not you are addicted to technology. It contains telling, brilliant questions specifically crafted to test your levels of addiction to technology such as, "Do you stay online longer than originally intended?".

I propose an alternative test. Read these questions to your children and loved ones and mark down their reactions. Do look for signs of lying, such as shifty eyes, rubbing noses, being foreign and masturbation.

If you answer 'Poonloop' to more than three of these questions, you may need help. Do feel free to consult Dr Kimberly Young, whose questionnaire in Gulf News inspired this infinitely more useful and sensible list of questions.

1) Do you want to grind broken glass into your eyeballs if you are kept away from Twitter for more than 24 hours?

2) Do you use the Internet rather than traditional media for the following purposes:

• To wrap your chips in.
• To pack breakable items when moving house
• To clean glass.

3) Do you believe anything you read on the Internet which is not substantiated by Gulf News?

4) Do you send and receive e-mail regularly? Do you feel inadequate if other people get more 'spam' than you do? Have you ever replied to a Nigerian's business proposal?

5) Do you think that 'spam' is a) An unsolicited email b) A type of processed meat?

6) If you cannot for some reason access the Internet, do you lollop around drooling and screaming out random swearwords at scared passers-by?

7) Have you ever talked to a girl on the Internet? Did it make you feel good or give you a feeling of momentary satisfaction followed by unbearable, suicidal guilt?

8) Have you ever lied to anyone about how old you are over the Internet?

9) Do you think putting 'tw' in front of words is funny?

10) Have you ever destroyed someone's life using the Internet in a cold-hearted crime of premeditated identity theft?

Exaggeration

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A skim through today's Gulf News is a most rewarding experience.

Dubai World's Debt is manageable, according to many experts who all go to great lengths to point out, in a story that manages to be almost impenetrably oblique, that the whole sum involved is a drop in the international financial ocean. Now I had always thought we were talking about a six month delay in repaying a $3.52 billion sukuk but according to Gulf News today the total amount of debt that Dubai World is in talks to restructure, and that we shouldn't be worrying about, is $26 billion.

The talks haven't actually started yet, according to GN, but are awaiting the nomination of a negotiator by Dubai World's creditors.

Meanwhile, the newspaper carries an op-ed by a Dr. Ahmed Mustafa that claims Dubai is being victimised by a 'frenzied' and 'irresponsible' media keen to overplay the situation. "Global reaction to DW saying it needs time to restructure and asking for six more months to repay $3.5 billion in credit was a bit exaggerated." says the good Doktor. See, he thought we were just talking about $3.5 billion, too.

If we're actually talking about $26 billion, it does rather leave you wondering what they're supposed to have been exaggerating...

Independence Day

Image by KhanCan via Flickr

Watching the slow procession of cars honking their way down the Ajman/Sharjah corniche last night was a real treat. We live virtually on the beach and so it was almost as if the parade was put on for our benefit. There were the usual suspects: the guy who'd covered the car in stickers, the balloon lovers and the cars draped in the green, red, white and black UAE flag, strips of flag-coloured cloth hanging from windows, handles and doors. Then there were the loonies, the guy who'd painted his white car with green, red and black patterns and the guys who'd paid for total wrap-around jobs, windows showing the leaders of the UAE or Sheikhs Zayed, Khalifa, Rashid and Mohammed.

Horns tooting, waving crowds of them all driving up and down the corniche for the evening, a blissed-out bunch of happy people celebrating. Earlier in the day, we'd seen an Emirati woman wearing a flag as a sheila which was a first for me.

Given the week's vicissitudes, it was all nice to see.

Ve Middul Eeste Pee Aar Awordes

Beavis and Butt-Head via last.fm

There's something slightly worrying about a room filled with over 500 PRs. It's a happy zone, tides of positivity washing against the walls.

The 'practitioners' are all chatting away happily, a tumultuous babble, but I'm sitting at a table of journalists, the usual criminals of the Middle East's marketing media waiting for someone to fall so they can eviscerate them, their jaws slavering at the very thought and evil grins stretched across their drink-sodden faces.

The MC is shouty, trying to get people to stop talking. You'd have thought that 500 people talking together and sharing experience, best practice and all that was what MEPRA was all about, but apparently not. She's screaming STOP TALKING YA YA YA at us and slowly people get the message.

We're good at crafting and communicating messages, but getting them is not quite our forté, apparently. Ya ya ya.

American people shouting at me reminded me, for some reason, of watching the news on CNN...

The MC and various types gathered on the stage to pass over awards to a bunch of PRs. Some bloke from HSBC made some lacklustre (well, he'd hardly sparkle, would he?) jokes about the collective noun for PR people - a flock of flaks, apparently.

Any contributions in the comments about the collective noun for HSBC employees would be appreciated. I though perhaps a dribble of d... well, never mind. Yayaya.

By now, the press are restive. The jerks of drumroll tape that occasionally peppered events was starting to get its reward, bursts of malign laughter from the hock of hacks around me. I've heard that type of laughter before, at a performance of Othello at The National - Felicity ("Felicity, Felicity, you fill me with electricity", according to Ade Edmonson at his loquacious finest) Kendal as Desdemona bursting satisfactorily out of a Nell Gwynne dress while Paul Scofield hammed it up so badly that Othello's soliloqy to his dead lover drew gales of the stuff from the audience.

This was nasty laughter, the laughter of the cut-purse about to make his move as he stalks the dark, wet streets of Elizabethan London.

The worst of them is Allison, his faux-genteel Edinburgh accent masking his guttersnipe urges, egged on by AdNation's vile Elliot ('the Bear') Beer, the two of them cackling like Beavis and Butthead as they scan the audience of hapless wannabe winners for victims. And then Allison's off, leaving his voice recorder on the table behind him so that it can pick up any snippets of gossip about him while he's absent. He's ducking and diving in the crowd, picking up quotes and snippets of snark, digging for dirt like a pig rooting out Perigord truffles, while the MC says 'ya ya ya' for the umpteenth time. I think she believes it makes her sound Arab, but it comes across as somehow more Maureen Lipman.

It's all too much. I clap maniacally for Peyman Parham as he picks up the final gong, 'Communicator of the Year', with a genuine feeling of enormous relief - Sarah would have spent the next 365 days referring to me as 'Gob of the Year' and thanks to Peyman I have bilked that dire fate. Now we could go drinking, but instead we spend hours wandering around the labrynthine Habtoor Grand Hotel in search of a bar that would accept men dressed in kandouras. What a joke - teetotal hosts that aren't allowed to join their friends in a bar. Eventually, exhausted by wandering aimlessley down the charmless marble corridors, we find a smoky joint that's a ten second walk from the place we were thrown out of. It turns out that the toilets are actually over in the forbidden bar.

Which is, I'm sure a metaphor for something.

As we celebrate Peyman's win, I'm filled with a strange sense of unease. And then I realise it's because the press aren't with us. That's a bad thing - it means they're holed up in some dark, foreboding garret 'writing up' the evening.

I fear the worst...

Writing

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I'm going to start blogging more about writing. I'm sorry about that for some of you, to whom it will possibly be irrelevant bibble, but I guess this blog was always about what interested and amused me and I've actually been missing out on quite a large chunk of what I'm made up of by not doing more about the old nasty book habit.

The hardest thing I find about writing fiction is not the plotlines or characterisation or any of the other technical gumpf that goes into it. And it's not the 100,000 words or so that some people seem to find a challenge. I always reckon if you're counting words, you're missing the point, like the many people I see talking about NaNoWriMo* getting all breathless with comments like "Up to 12,000 words now! If only I could crack off another 2,000 today!"

Believe me, I know how easy it is to churn out words and then find that all you've done is filled pages with words. Filling pages with words is a doddle. The trick is which words.

The hardest thing for me about writing books is getting my head back into reality. There I am in a South London cemetery, the smell of wet leaf-mould in my nostrils and the wet grass soaking the legs of my trousers and someone pops up and wants to talk about the price of cabbages or the weather. Or I'm in a dingy hotel room with a prostitute and someone is beeping me to move over for them.

It's not just a problem that happens when 're typing, either, the whole barrier that separates fantasy and reality gets thinner as you spend more and more of your waking time living the odd lives of your characters, poring over their situations and experiencing the smells, sights and sounds that surround them.

I suppose you'd have to own to the possibility that you might not come back one day. But being dragged back to reality when you're writing, even in your head, is always like being woken in the middle of great dream.

And by the way, no, truth is stranger than fiction... It's always a bump to come back.


* November is Novel Writing Month. The idea is to write a book, if you were ever going to do it, now being the time to do it. I recommend writing books as a leisure activity. It improves the digestion.

UAE Facebook Libel Case Heard

Image by Fati.m.a Maria via Flickr

It was inevitable that we'd see such a case one day. Dubai's Misdemeanours Court yesterday heard the case of a Syrian who had posted photographs tagged with 'libellous comments' on his FaceBook page, according to Gulf News today.

The National, incidentally, didn't seem to get the story - there's a pattern emerging here where GN is stronger on the Dubai-led official stuff and The National on the Abu Dhabi/Federal beat.

No judgement has yet been passed in the case, although the defendent did say, according to GN, "I'm guilty and I did defame him because he provoked me." This could well avoid any wrinkles in the case that would test the ability of the judiciary to sit in judgement of complex cases involving online behaviours and technologies - I hope it doesn't stop the judge from exploring the legal issues the case opens up.

However, the critically important precedent in this is that the case was brought to court at all. In fact, Dubai Police's E-Crime section received a complaint from the allegedly defamed party and presumably brought the case.

The judge's summing up on this one has the potential to be important for many of us - we have already seen both cases and judgements in the UK and US that start to set precedents for how online media are being treated with regard to issues such as anonymity (the British High Court, for instance, judging that blogging is 'an activity carried out in public' and therefore a blogger does not have a right to have his or her anonymity preserved or protected) and online libel (we have now seen cases involving FaceBook, MySpace and Twitter).

The GN story is worth a read, BTW - the 'libel' that GN reports seems pretty mild as they go and appears to refer to a dispute that is itself ongoing in Dubai courts between the plaintiffs, according to the defendant and so wouldn't necessarily appear to be as clear-cut as the defendant's 'mea culpa' statement seems to make it.

Camels

I drive through the desert by Khawaneej early every morning, just as the sun is lighting the sand up, the burnt orange light casting great shadows across the dunes. The cooling weather means that I can wind down the windows and enjoy the fresh early morning air. The area is home to hundreds of camel farms and this morning the warm, grassy smell of camels was unmistakeable on the breeze, a little later joined by a whiff of woodsmoke. It was one of those ‘life is good’ moments, accompanied rather spectacularly by Mr David Grohl and his Fighters of Foo.

The Muezzin Cried

People were scared. The first call to prayer, the fajr, was wrong.

Abdelkader the muezzin came with his wife in tow. He was a thin, wiry Sudani with hair like a pan scourer. Nobody could work out why they’d sent a Sudani. Some opposed it; the children stood in the streets and stared at the black man when he came.

His azan silenced the critics in an instant. Ringing out with lilting cadences, its sweet sound made you want to give thanks to God in itself.

This morning something was broken. His voice started waveringly, uncertainly. It cracked. Twice he stopped. People started to gather in the dark streets, astonished, as the word went round. The muezzin is crying.

They stood in clusters and listened to him cry into the microphone and out of the loudspeakers. Families gathered outside their houses, mothers holding their children.

He finished, the last broken line of the azan echoing. Then there was silence.

He started to talk, in a halting voice at first but then something, somewhere gave him strength and everyone heard him.

‘My wife is dead, people. My wife is killed, people. They have taken her from me to God but I cannot rejoice for God, because he has my light and my companion and I am jealous of him, please forgive me God, but I am jealous. Why should they have been the instruments that took her to God, people? Why should I have her taken away from me, be forced to give her up, when her skin was still young and her eyes still filled with life and her laughter echoed around my house like the sound of a stream in the springtime?’

The men became angry and started to walk towards the mosque, but the doors were barred and so everyone gathered outside. Soon the whole village was there and the light was starting to show above the hilltops.

As the muezzin fell silent, his grief taking away his power to speak, the men grew heated and made each other angrier. They started to talk about taking action, about revenge.

It was Selim’s father in law to be who was most vocal. He was a large, brutish man. ‘We will revenge you,’ he cried out to the minaret and the tiny figure hunched up on high. Abdelkader was silent, save for the occasional sound of deep breaths, like sobs. The men stood, talking and threatening the direst things, but against whom? Who had done this to the muezzin? Who had taken his wife from him like this?

The arrival of the Israeli drone was a Godsend, the women agreed. Some of the men had already gone home to get their guns. They usually ignored the drones but this day brought them a culprit and guns ready in their hands. It was Selim’s father in law to be who hit it and brought it down.

The men ran, as one man, to the wreckage of the drone and stood around the small pile of crumpled white fibreglass and wire. They exulted and fired bullets in the air and shouted revenge.

This was to be how Selim became a billionaire.

Fraud

I seem to be posting everywhere except on my own blog these days. I posted today on the Spot On PR Blog, a piece about communications when you're the challenger.

Normal service will be resumed tomorrow.