The word freedom is broad and elastic. But as any issue has a basis and rules, so there is nothing called freedom in the absolute sense of the word. I still remember something I learned from my professor at Marshall University in the United States, where I was doing my master’s degree in journalism.
I remember when he told me, “We (Americans) call the main road a freeway, but it is not that the road has no rules, despite the name”.
The professor said there were tens of rules on the use of these roads and tens of violations took place on them, despite the name freeway.
This means there is no absolute freedom in any respect. Instead, there are rules, duties, rights, responsibilities and general moral obligations that everybody should fulfil.
This means there must be clarification and detailed interpretation of the concept of so called freedom in public culture. My question here – and I pose this question even before I ask about the degree of freedom granted to the press in the Gulf region in general – is: Do we really have a print media, before we talk about its freedom?
I mean the real meaning of the press, with its all elements. Do we have newspapers that represent the government, others for the opposition and still others for trade unions etc, which allows everybody to express his opinion?
No doubt, our newspapers are doing their best – although they still belong to commercial institutions that seek financial profit.
Do we have citizen journalists apart from chief editors?
True, like other civilized countries in the world, we have our own newspapers, but the issue is not a matter of publishing newspapers, but rather what is their philosophy, their content.
Newspapers are not like public parks where anybody from anywhere in the world can go for a picnic. What can we expect from expatriate employees who get meagre salaries and face dismissal for simple mistakes? What do we expect from expatriate journalists, who do not belong to the country?
True, there are a number of good writers and wonderful articles, but there is a clear absence of investigative journalism.
It is important to underline the importance of finding a definition of press freedom and identifying the rights of the state and citizens as far as the freedom of press is concerned. But this can be done only after establishing real newspapers.
