He spent practically ten years telling the Middle East everything that was happening “in the other part of the world”. From Chavez’s Venezuela to Lula’s Brazil, Latin America and the troubled passage to democracy in many of these countries was Dima Khatib’s “obsession”. He reported almost by the minute (and by the meter) in 140-character tweets.
The trip to the southern hemisphere is over, the leadership at Al-Jazeera jumped the Atlantic and traveled to Europe and returned to base: the Middle East. Now, the goal has turned 180 degrees and Dima, current director of AJ+ (Al-Jazeera’s label and responsible for content on social media) wants to “tell the whole world what is happening in the Middle East”. Even if, to do so, you need to point your finger when you look in the mirror.
“The media needs to report the deaths of journalists. And not to be accomplices, not to say this as if they were always suspects or terrorists”, he tells Renaissance. It is a “mea culpa” that he makes on behalf of the entire profession – the one that wants to place more journalists in Gaza, but which could “pressure and report more” to defend journalists in Gaza, but also so that other reporters could travel from other parts of the world to report on the conflict “with different eyes”.
“There is jjournalists who just don’t leave Gaza because they can’t. So, they continue to work. I have a friend who, whenever she can talk to me, tells me greets her with ‘goodbye’ and says goodbye saying that her time has come. (…) And there are other journalists who try to report this, but who are not defended by the media outlets themselves – and end up resigning”, he reported, during a conference at the Web Summit.
Source: rr.sapo.pt
