"How to Lose Your Job at a Saudi Newspaper"

The title is all Fawaz Turki's, or at least the op-ed editor's at the Washington Post. That's where today Turki has published an opinion piece explaining what's wrong with the state of newspapers in the Arab world. It's a bit of an angry rant, but at least it's a juicy one:

I was unceremoniously fired this month by my Saudi newspaper, a leading English-language daily called Arab News.

It didn't matter that I had been the senior columnist on the op-ed page for nine years or that my work was quoted widely in the European and American media, including this paper. What mattered was that I had committed one of the three cardinal sins an Arab journalist must avoid when working for the Arab press: I criticized the government...

Never mind that a newspaper cheapens and debases the idea of the journalistic enterprise when it enjoins its commentators against being critical of the government that it is supposed to be a watchdog over. Never mind the absurdity of preventing your contributors from touching on the issue of Islam, a social ideology whose embrace by jihadists is the top news story in the world today. And never mind that Arab society -- a society that remains broken in body and spirit more than a half-century after independence -- needs very much to engage in serious self-assessment and to promote an open debate in the media among intellectuals, academics, political analysts and others about why Arabs have failed all these years to meet the challenges of modernity.

But those are the stringent, not to mention pathetic, rules that determine how the Arab press conducts its business. You play by these rules or you're cut off. The problem is that if stringing words together is the only way you know how to make a living, you end up eating humble pie and playing the game by whatever rules they set for you...

What Arabs, including those masquerading as their newspaper editors, have yet to learn is that a free press, a truly free press, is a moral imperative in society. Subvert it, and you subvert the public's sacrosanct right to know and a newspaper's traditional role to expose. If the Western democracies work better than many others, it is because to them the concept of accountability, expected from the head of state on down, is a crucial function of their national ideology...

For Arabs, there is still a great divide between word and world. You can embrace conspiracy theories with impressive ease, and be accorded by your editors the right to pontificate about any foolish thing you want, but don't dare write about the malfeasance of political leaders in Egypt and Palestine, or the atrocities of a fellow-Muslim government in East Timor. The price you must pay for such offenses if you work for the Arab press is heavy indeed.

We don't need to take Turki at his word. Even if there were other (internal newspaper) reasons behind his firing, his indictment rings true beyond his particular case. On the one hand, the latitude for regional journalists is perhaps wider than ever before, with even Saudi-government owned papers (like Arab News) sometimes running critical pieces. And in past years or under other dictators, Turki would simply have disappeared (though he appears to file his columns from the United States).

On the other hand, the problem today seems to be that the lines are not clear. Sometimes the pendulum swings toward open uncensored editorial pages. And then suddenly it swings back. The journalist crosses a suddenly-declared red line - and his or her job is history (if not worse).

This state of affairs stems from a social order where freedom of expression is not an enshrined right for all individuals. It's a privilege extended to various degrees by rulers, and it can be revoked at their whim. To provide an analogy, it would be as if this blog were owned by the Saudi government, and suddenly-

(get the idea?)

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