Zawaya

The press should avoid sensationalism

By: Khemais Khayati

The Maghreb press, like any other throughout the world, is fulfilling its function of informing citizens especially in crisis times, and the emergence of the swine flu pandemic is an example of crisis. The majority of newspapers has roughly respected media ethics, as they wrote about preventive measures such as creating hotlines, or importing sufficient quantities of medicine, etc. However, some Tunisian, Algerian, and Moroccan newspapers – with political orientations that are generally Islamist, or an editorial line that is “people” oriented – have played the fear card, and some of them had some “fundamentalist” traces … That was the case for example of Echourouk El Youmi (Algeria), which pointed out the danger to which Algeria is exposed according to the WHO … It also mentioned the involvement of various ministries, such as national defense, interior, health, agriculture, national security and customs, in the fight against H1N1 … This might affect political incompatibilities… We could read also therein, signed by a commentator, that "The USA is the land of Nobel Prizes in different sciences. It’s the country that wants to change the world map and the history of people. This country is the world, and is now offering us one of its inventions, which is the swine flu, after it had exhausted us in the past about the loss of immunity (AIDS)”. It is true that the commentator did not attribute the flu to “Jews”, as some Egyptian newspapers did, but we smell a rat…
In Morocco, Attajdid (which also has an Islamist orientation) played the same old tune and, for example, held in abeyance readers concerning the death of a zoo keeper. Other newspapers such as al-Hadath (Tunisia) raised on its cover the possibility of “canceling the pilgrimage due to swine flu.” For its part, al-Sarih titled five main columns as “the world under pigs’ feet” … This kind of practices did not aim to cool down the atmosphere. The result was that since the creation of a hotline, more than 276 calls were recorded in one day, with an average of eleven calls per hour… Just like the Algerian press supported that the government purchases thousands and thousands of masks, the Moroccan press talked about the installation of fever detectors in public places…
From these examples, it is clear that the press is responsible – for more than one reason – for the state of anxiety in which the population has been placed, which can lead to panic … But generally, it was not without political or commercial ulterior motives… In contrast, other newspapers – such as Liberté, or al-Watan (Algeria), or Aujourd’hui le Maroc (Morocco), or Le Temps (Tunisia) among others – have fulfilled their duties in a very honorable way, and they have even published funny papers to relax the atmosphere… If such conditions prevail in the Maghreb countries, it is because the press, in general, tends more to pump up rumor balls than to inflate the maze of investigations. That is one of the recurring issues of sub-information that the Maghreb citizens suffer from…