A technical problem never captured the essence of reportage, and a channel, as well as when the anchor on Al Jazeera English announced that they could not proceed with an interview with one of Saddam Hussein’s lawyers because they were trying to do the interview live in translation and there was a glitch that was making this difficult. The manner of his death, the court proceedings, which depending upon who you listened to on the day when he was killed was either fair or kangaroo-style, the choice of the day on which he was taken to the gallows, his final act of refusing the hood, and all the elements that led to the moment when the trapdoor was opened, have been reported and telecast. What made Al Jazeera’s English the channel of choice for the English language viewer was precisely this translation of events.
Journalism is not often, at least for those who practice it, thought of as a process of translation, of making those who do not understand the language of a particular part of the world intelligible to those who belong to another part. But when it comes to reporting events that are distant, and unless one speaks of neighbourhood or community press or television, all other kinds of reporting are necessarily distanced from the reader or viewer, stories need to be retold. It is in this act of retelling that the competence and skill of the reporter lies.
While there are the usual skill sets of language, technical abilities, even procedural knowledge of what the legal, financial, or administrative framework is in a given place, what is crucial is the cultural competence of a reporter. Let us leave aside for a moment the important debate whether cultural competence can ever be granted or acquired by an outsider. But the fact that this competence is a resource, almost a sine qua non cannot be denied.
It is this competence, however wrongly, unjustly, or fairly, that people address when they say that those who report on issues with an outsider’s perspective can never get things right. It is almost a truism that the greater the distance of the origin of the journalist on a scene, the greater will be the allegation of his incompetence and ignorance in reporting. This phenomenon has a flip side. The journalists from the region or place will be judged as being biased and in favour of the local, variously defined. The allegation that Mr George Bush makes constantly about the biased nature of Al Jazeera, even to the point of fomenting violence, is pretty much of the same cloth as the allegation made about newspapers in Gujarat during the violence, or about the Indian press made during the last decade of the British rule, as being biased, untrue, and inflammatory. The generalization, which if one were to think of all these as examples of an inside press, is that a certain sense of belongingness and concomitantly competence is deemed essential for the ‘locals’, which becomes problematic to the outsiders. There is a double translation at work here. While the inside press within translate the events into the spoken and written idiom of the people, the press that speaks to the other translates the event to the language of the outside world.
The question that all this begs is who is best qualified to translate the events. One who knows the local language better or one who knows better the language in which the events have to be translated? Al Jazeera’s strength and its use in the reportage of such events as Hussein’s hanging was that it knows the local language better. Whether it was taking the viewer to Cairo, Baghdad, Doha, or Damascus, Al Jazeera English was giving its viewers the emotions, feelings, and views of the Arab world, both Sunni and Shia. The channel largely through its guests, than its anchors, was making distinctions that would be lost on the outside world.
The technical glitch was a moment of revelation, almost a journalistic epiphany when the important function of journalism as translation was on air for the viewer to see. This idea is often forgotten in the hurly burly of being reporters, of adhering to principles of fairness and accuracy, and of upholding professional codes and standards that have little affective impact on the viewer or reader.
