In my journalism class, Al-Masry Al-Youm’s story on a purportedly “secret information deal between the American University in Cairo and the Pentagon would have received a failing mark.
What is true is that the US Department of Defense has been funding the Naval American Medical Research Unit (NAMRU) facilities here in Egypt since 2006, and the support is worth roughly $2 million.
But what the newspaper didn’t report is that NAMRU has been in Egypt since 1946 at the invitation of the Egyptian government, and that its purpose is to find cures to diseases, not pass along “confidential information about Egypt.
Nor did the paper report that ordinary Egyptians actually working at NAMRU’s facilities, attempting to discover if some bacteria can cause cancer; or that the facility helps young Egyptian biology students learn the science.
So how could Al-Masry Al-Youm get it so wrong? The answer, unfortunately, is that like any lazy student, the newspaper didn’t do its homework.
For instance, though the story ran across the top of its front page, the newspaper did not actually report the story itself. Instead, it published what it received from America in Arabic, an ethnic newswire in Washington, DC.
What that newswire did to discover this contract was what anyone with an internet connection could have done: it visited www.usaspending.gov, the website where the US government publishes records of its non-classified spending – so much for a “secret deal.
Al-Masry Al-Youm would have known all of this, had they done any reporting on their own, such as possibly calling AUC and the US embassy in Cairo to find out what the funding was for, or actually sending a reporter to AUC to check out NAMRU’s work here.
But its editors chose not to, as it has been explained to me, because they wanted to publish what they had.
That sort of practice flies in the face of basic fairness, research and objectivity required of any journalistic publication.
This leads to the most troubling aspect of the story: the loaded language included obscure terms like “confidential information that suggest some dark secret lurking underneath.
That’s great for conspiracy theories, but journalists only deal with facts. My students at the Caravan, the campus newspaper, wrote about the ongoing work at NAMRU last year, and they received precise explanations from real people about what the US money was going towards.
“What NAMRU focuses on is epidemiology of infectious diseases, said Rania Siam, a molecular microbiologist at the facility.
In other words, scientists there are investigating the causes of diseases like cancer and avian flu, studying them in petri dishes under microscopes.
If only such scrutiny were taking place at Al-Masry Al-Youm, possibly such shoddy journalism wouldn’t make it to print.
Maybe they could use a basic refresher in reporting and editing, and I’d be willing to provide them that. But for that to happen, though, they would need to actually come to AUC.
Suleman Din is assistant professor of Journalism at the American University in Cairo.
