Striking the Wrong Note
Striking the Wrong Note Nazih El Ahdab | Senior Presenter, Al Jazeera News Channel
The team behind the book you are reading now requested that I write about one of my most memorable experiences with Al Jazeera. I am not as good at talking about myself as I am about politics, but I will do my best. I have been with Al Jazeera for just five of its 25-year journey. When I first pitched my weekly satire show to the editorial management, I knew it was going to be a herculean task for many reasons. One of those was that Al Jazeera is known for its professionalism built on facts and figures. It would take a magic formula to devise a humorous satire show that adhered to Al Jazeera’s code of ethics – that presented those facts and figures in a burlesque fashion, that was professionally purposeful yet humorous in tone. I never lost sight of the key concept: to be critical without malice or excessiveness and to expose the hypocrisy and contradiction that is rife in political and media narratives. My proposal was ultimately approved, although some of the decision-makers within the Network felt I was ‘hitting the wrong note’. The show pitch had first carried the name ‘The Fifth Estate’ as it was supposed to be a critic of the three ‘estates of the realm’ – namely, the legislative, executive and judicial powers – as well as the ‘fourth
estate,’ the media. I later found out that the German TV channel Deutsche Welle (DW) had a show with the same name; a kind of telepathy I suppose. So, we dropped the title and came up with the current one: ‘Above the Estate.’ From day one, I meant to be a critic of all that comes my way, without exception, including Qatar and its close ally Turkey. Otherwise, the show would be yet another form of the same hypocrisy we criticise. We, at Al Jazeera, truly practice what we preach. An example of this was one of the early episodes slamming the excessive display of the Emir of Qatar’s portrait across Doha during the blockade arbitrarily imposed against the country by three GCC states. I waited for a response from the Qatari government, at least a ‘gentle reproof’ phone call. There was none. The show also criticised Qatar’s minimal ‘working relationship’ with Israel and the coordination of its relations with the Gaza Strip through the Israelis. And it did not stop there. It criticised Qatar’s refusal to restore relations with Damascus while maintaining good relations with Assad’s staunch ally, Iran. The show also dissected all the claims raised by the blockading states against Qatar, to find out if any were
true. We also slammed the “schizophrenic behaviour” of certain Islamists who support Erdogan’s rule in a secular country, while categorically rejecting secularism in their own; and those who turn a blind eye to Erdogan’s alliance with Putin and Rouhani, while refusing to restore relations with Assad, who is backed only by Moscow and Tehran. The ‘Above the Estate’ show went the extra mile to question whether Qatar has footed the bill for Trump’s ravenous appetite and also examined whether Qatar’s Shura Council Act meets international legal standards. “Qatar’s sports bodies normalise relations with their Israeli counterparts, while Qatar’s anti-normalisation groups condemn the move. We join our voice to theirs,” is what I said in one of the episodes. The show also blamed Al Jazeera itself for allowing Israeli officials and analysts to speak through its screen and for focusing more on the rising human cost of the war in Yemen after the blockade was imposed on Qatar. It is said that no one is infallible and that includes Al Jazeera. However, Al Jazeera’s atmosphere is the purest; it is where every honest person can breathe freedom easily. And so long as I am breathing, I shall continue to ‘hit the wrong note.’
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