Mohammed calls for freedom of speech, reforms in Arab media
By Muawia E. Ibrahim
10 January 2005
Gen. Shaikh Mohammed urged the media to focus on dealing with issues of women, children and education. He said that though the Arab media had played a major role, their pioneering role was broken when the Arab world suffered from despotic regimes, which discovered the power of the media and controlled it and changed its real objective.
‘These regimes have changed the objectives of media from serving the homeland to serving them, and from clarifying the wrongdoings to justifying them, and from a platform of dialogue between different powers of society to a weapon to defame opponents and other opinions,’ he pointed out.
After several defeats and failures in the development process and when concealing reality became impossible, these regimes put the blame on others, either on internal conspiracies or external ones and their media began to justify the failure instead of explaining it. It begins to present the people, who failed, as victims not only to save them from bearing their responsibility, but also to honour them, instead of blame them.