The Journalist as Citizen

By Carlos H. Conde

Muntadar al-Zaidi, the Iraqi television journalist who hurled his shoes at President George W. Bush during a press briefing  in Iraq’s Green Zone yesterday, has become a folk hero. His outburst, while denounced by many, has been praised throughout the Arab world, by anti-imperialist activists, even by some Americans who are critical of the US invasion of Iraq.

No matter how we view his action, this is undeniable: His rage is rooted in his own experience not so much as a journalist but as an Iraqi citizen.

In mainstream journalism, we are told that we have to be objective in the stories that we write and report. In a perfect world, objectivity should be an ideal that every journalist should aspire to achieve. But we, most of all Muntadar al-Zaidi, don’t live in a  perfect world.

There has always been a debate on how a journalist should conduct himself given the injustice he witnessed first hand. Should he just write about it? Or should he actively take part in the event to ensure that the injustice doesn’t happen or continue?

This reminds me of Kevin Carter, a South African photojournalist who shot to fame for his Pulitzer Prize-winning picture of a vulture ready to pounce on a weak child in famine-torn Sudan. He later committed suicide because he was haunted by the “vivid memories of killings and corpses and anger and pain … of starving or wounded children, of trigger-happy madmen,” and presumably because he did not do enough to help the child in his picture.

Some said that if Carter had not been  a journalist, he probably would have helped the child – as if journalism necessarily strips us of our humanity, of our compassion and of the need to take a stand.

Journalists are hamstrung by the conventions of mainstream journalism, most of all by this animal called objectivity. This is why, no matter how the Bush administration lies about Iraq, the journalists who cover his press conferences wouldn’t dare question him to his face about these lies, let alone throw a shoe at him – because doing so, to question the official line, would be impolite and would make you less objective in the eyes of those you cover and your colleagues. A good journalist, in this context, is one that parrots the official line.

This is probably what IF Stone meant when he once said that “objectivity is just an excuse to regurgitate the conventional wisdom of the day,” or words to that effect. Objectivity, in other words, turns journalists into unthinking and unfeeling robots.

But back to al-Zaidi. What he did was to show that he is a citizen before anything else; that he, too, feels the pain of his fellow Iraqis. It would be best, of course, if he demonstrated his outrage by being a hard-hitting and critical journalist – and there seems to be no indication that he did not; after all, he would reportedly sign off his TV reports by saying “…reporting from occupied Iraq, this is Muntadar al-Zaidi” – but, in his context, I think it would be difficult to judge him for what he did.

We can all argue till we are blue in the face that throwing a shoe at a visiting head of state is uncivilized but compared to the crimes committed against the Iraqi people all these years, often with the direct participation or complicity of the United States, that is nothing. A supreme act of insult like throwing a shoe at somebody is something that, much like spitting at someone in the face, inevitably raises a far more important question: What did you do to deserve it?

As to al-Zaidi, his career as a journalist may have gone kaput, at least in the mainstream press. But I guess that’s a price he was willing to pay for taking a stand. Because, after all is said and done, that is what al-Zaidi’s shoe throwing really means. And because he actually did what many Iraqis have only been dreaming of doing to George W. Bush all these years, I bet that made him prouder of himself than all the years he spent covering the news.

Is he a rotten journalist because of this? It depends, although I don’t think you can witness an injustice and bottle up the rage it creates in you without acting on it when the opportunity comes. Al-Zaidi is a journalist. He knows the story of Iraq perhaps more than anybody else. But more than anything else, he’s an Iraqi citizen. He feels the pain of his people perhaps more than any journalist in Baghdad does. Did we really expect him to just sit there and watch Bush lie through his teeth again and insult the memory of those who suffered in Iraq because of America’s act of aggression?

Carlos H. Conde is a journalist based in Manila.