A Castaway’s Treasure Chest
With my scant experience of television, I could not have imagined that one day I would be right in the thick of it; living in the heart of a one-of-a-kind media phenomenon – Al Jazeera. Al Jazeera was born at a time when the global community had started to embrace human rapprochement. Al Jazeera soon took the lead, not because of its technical innovation, but because of its professional demeanour in handling news stories, chiefly the political ones. From the beginning, it parted ways from the mainstream media, which remained - till this day - in the shackles of state authority. Like a castaway returning to civilization, I joined Al Jazeera in 1997. It was the beginning of a new quest for knowledge; for the truth. Like no other Arab media outlet, Al Jazeera adopted the charter of integrity and objectivity; closer to Western media such as the BBC. What made Al Jazeera stand out was the space it gave to ‘the counter opinion’ within Arab political circles, which was deemed an evil as sinful as blasphemy. Bold in content, but not daring enough in narrative, Al Jazeera’s early wording of a news story stopped at the image. Like the returning castaway, I kept watching from a distance; taming my pen to write to the image, which speaks volumes. It is said that an image speaks a thousand words. To me, an image speaks most of, but not the
A Castaway’s Treasure Chest Fawzi Bushra | Principal Producer, Al Jazeera News Channel
Striving to understand the world around me, I spent my younger years reading books and listening to the radio. My fellow Sudanese villagers and I discovered the world through our ears. When I later discovered televisions, the world for me was no longer mere voices. Stranded after heavy rain, my father and I had to spend the night at a friend’s house in Sinjah, the closest town to our village. As we sat in the yard, he brought out a wooden box with curved glass in the middle. I was seven years old and thought it must have been a radio; albeit a bigger one than ours.
Then, a household member switched it on and to my surprise there were living people talking inside that box. They were followed by singers, who added soul and spirit to the lyrics carved into my imagination. I could not sleep that night. Six years later, in the capital, Khartoum, I again encountered something new: the colour television. During the following three years, I happened across the television only once or twice. I was not an exception; this was the case for almost all village dwellers in the vast Arab World.
Television carries powerful images, capable of not only conveying messages, but also of misleading by misrepresenting facts. As our world has become a tangled web of visual effects, television has had a heavy sway over our thinking and perception. It is a double-edged sword. At that time, everything was malleable in the iron fist of the state, which tightened its grip on the media: telling its people what it wanted to and denying them what it felt would defile their ‘political innocence’.
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