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Madinat al-Muslimeen Islamic Message Board
| 'I am paid to be biased' |
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| jaihoon |
| 04/29/02 at 12:14:47 |
| Friedman walkout raises eyebrows Dubai |By Mildred Fernandes | 29-04-2002 The dramatic walkout by Thomas Friedman, the award-winning Foreign Affairs columnist for the New York Times, cast a temporary pall over the opening session of the second Arab Media Summit at the Emirates Towers hotel yesterday. Friedman, whose appearance at the summit was a last-minute surprise, was the first guest speaker of the day, following speeches by Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum and Amr Moussa, Secretary General of the Arab League. Although Friedman began his presentation by assuring the assembled audience that he would welcome a dialogue on specific questions, that assurance was short-lived. In the question-and-answer session that followed presentations by Friedman, Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, Eric Rouleau of Le Monde and Martin Woollacott of The Guardian about the Western media and its views of the Arab world, three audience members questioned Friedman about the bias in his work and about Israeli injustices toward Palestinians. The fourth question, from a Saudi Arabian national, prompted an outburst from Friedman. "Let's get one thing real clear," he said, in response to the Saudi national's statement about Friedman accepting a Saudi government-sponsored trip to the kingdom. Friedman, whose impressive career includes an eight-year stint with the New York Times reporting from war zones in and around Israel, the Palestinian territories, Egypt and Lebanon, was also recently responsible for breaking the news of Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah's peace plan to the world after being invited to the kingdom by the prince. "I'm paid to have an opinion, paid to be subjective and not objective," he told audience members before the walkout. "I'm paid to be biased, as it were. That's the object of being a columnist." It was that openness that surprised Mohammed Boo Dai, the Saudi Arabian lecturer whose question triggered the Pulitzer Prize-winner's walkout. Boo Dai said Friedman's reaction could have been caused by a translation mistake. "I am not happy with what happened, because I respect Friedman," Boo Dai said after the end of the summit's first session. "I wanted to ask him why, when he had the chance to come to Saudi Arabia and meet many people, he would walk out in the same way if somebody said something he did not like." Boo Dai was disappointed by the columnist's behaviour despite Friedman's eventual return to the hall. "He came back, yes, but he cut my speech, he did not let me finish, which is not good. He must wait till I am finished and then speak. I am not saying he took the plane from America to here, but that he made round in Saudi Arabia by special plane, not from America - this was to make it easy for him to meet people from all over, because Saudi Arabia is a big country. "But I think he did not understand me, and maybe something was wrong in the translation." Boo Dai, who holds a doctorate in Arabic literature, said he reads Arabic translations of Friedman's columns. - Gulf News |
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