Joris Luyendijk tells the story of his five years as a correspondent in the Middle East. Extremely young for a correspondent but fluent in Arabic, he spoke with stone throwers and terrorists, taxi drivers and professors, victims and aggressors, and community leaders and families. He chronicles first-hand experiences of dictatorship, occupation, terror, and war. His stories cast light on a number of major crises, from the Iraq War to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, along with less-reported issues such as underage orphan trash collectors in Cairo. The more he witnesses, the less he understands, and he becomes increasingly aware of the yawning gap between what he sees on the ground and what is later reported in the media. As a correspondent, he is privy to a multitude of narratives with conflicting implications, and he sees over and over again that the media favours the stories that will be sure to confirm the popularly held, oversimplified beliefs of westerners. In Fit to Print, Luyendijk deploys powerful examples, leavened with humour, to demonstrate the ways in which the media gives us a filtered, altered, and manipulated image of reality in the Middle East.
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Very enlightening, I have read many books on Muslims since 9/11 trying to comprehend 'Terrorism' & though they have taught me a great deal of tollerance & respect, none have come close like 'Fit To Print' on explaining how alien western perception of the Middle East is & why 'they' don't think the way we do. Before reading this book I could not have imagined how oppressive the daily lives of people are in many of these countries & often the direction anger & frustration take is not what caused it.
We only show an interest in things that 'happen', but if we know nothing of the day to day existance of the people in those media reports our perception of events is mis-guided. In a similar way people in India see attacks on Indian students in Australia as endemic, because they know little of life in Australia on a normal day.
'Fit To Print' explains the day to day reality of living in the Middle East, the fear & intimidation that make it hard for reporters to verify stories in countries where the truth is routinely supressed & anyone could be an informant or secret police. George Orwell's '1984' may be a fiction in Britain, but it is very real in many parts of the Middle East!
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