Titolo furviante perché in realtà descrive di più la 'professione reporter' (il mestiere del reporter, nemmeno troppo bello) che non la 'gente' del medioriente.
Aggiungete pure che è decisamente troppo ripetitivo. ( )

This is an awesome book! It’s a non-fiction written by a Dutch journalist who worked as foreign correspondent in the Middle East for a good number of years. The book is about how the media (and then specifically television) portrays that region and how the usual way of making (TV)news in the Western world doesn’t work over there. So what we see here is never what it actually is, not because the networks don’t want us to know, but because TV by it’s nature can’t do it. Not in the Middle East, where most countries have some form of dictatorship as government. TV generally evokes a more visceral reaction, but that doesn’t work if you just put a voice over with pretty pictures. You need an actual person on screen to tell his or her story and in the Middle East, people will gladly tell their story, but often not on TV where they can be identified and become targets of police and government security services and all that crap. So you can tell a story there, but you’ll need writing a lot more, and that just doesn’t get the same attention and reaction as TV does.
This should be required reading for anyone working in media. Hell, even for everyone else.

http://www.tsemoana.net/?p=506 ( )

Another interesting read is Joris Luyendijk’s “Het zijn net Mensen” , published in 2006 (and translated in English as “People Like Us: misrepresenting the Middle East”). He was a foreign correspondent in the Middle East for a Dutch newspaper and for Dutch radio and TV, for five years until the American invasion in Iraq. Although primarily an attack on the way journalism works, he illustrates this by focusing on the contradictions in the Middle East – the entire Middle East, Lebanon is just a very small element here, but Luyendijk actually does make the point in that you can tell the same story in many different ways, depending on your point of entry and on your use of language. And there is no right or wrong.

http://www.bookcrossing.com/journal/8227721

When I bought this book I knew it was about journalism, the Middle East, one persons opinion. What surprised me very much is, that I liked the book so very much.

I'll never watch the evening news again without, in the back of my mind, hearing that little voice saying: is this crowd really a crowd or just several people, filmed from a good angle? Or: is there really noone in that particular country that has a different opinion?

To me this book made perfectly clear that what we see as 'news', is made by human beings, with their own backgrounds and filters, led by the 'madness of the day', what the big news agencies dictate, what the public at home wants to hear or see and what news they are able to get background nformation about.

You shouldn't look at the Arab / Palestinian / Israeli world with western eyes. They live under different circumstances, have different cultures. There should be room for correspondents to explain differences, to show the people behind the rhetorics of the officials and the spokes persons.
The other way round should journalists from that region that are covering 'the west' be allowed to get more nsight information on what is going on and why. And be enabled to give a more balanced view on the western world and thoghts.

If a correspondent would start with an explanation of the situation and explain why he cannot know the things the public wants to see or hear, the public might gradually be able to look 'at the other side' too. IF the regimes (western and arabic / israeli / palestinian all the same) will allow voices to be heard and pictures to be seen that go against or differ from the main stream opinion of what they (in their positins of power in whatever form) decide is good for us.

WOW book!

P.S. According to the note in the back of the book this book has been translated in Arabic, German, Danish, Hungarian, Ialian and English. If you're interested, you might try to find it. It is really worth reading! ( )

niet uitgelezen ( )