Fit to Print
misrepresenting the Middle East
Joris Luyendijk (Translated by Michele Hutchison)
‘Luyendijk writes damn well and is a very honest journalist. Fit to Print is a very good book that examines the limitations of journalism, especially when it comes to the coverage of complex conflicts and regions. It sets out in clear and dramatic terms the key shortcoming of much reporting: the inability of journalists to express doubt and to admit that they don’t know all that much, in many circumstances, about what is really happening in the countries they are covering. There is much in this book we should all be discussing and thinking about.’
Michael Gawenda, former editor of The Age, and director of Centre for Advanced Journalism, University of Melbourne
A young journalist’s foray down the rabbit hole of media-led reporting — a tale of disillusionment and self-examination set in the world’s most headline-grabbing regions.
In Fit to Print, which became a bestseller in Holland, 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 speaks with stone throwers and terrorists, taxi drivers and professors, victims and aggressors, and community leaders and families. Chronicling 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.
But the more Luyendijk 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 favors 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 humor, to demonstrate the ways in which the media gives us a filtered and manipulated image of reality in the Middle East.
Reviews
‘Fit To Print should be on the reading list of anybody who wants to understand why news is filtered and cares for the direction that international news reporting is heading towards, especially in the Middle East. The experiences that Joris Luyendijk shares with us are presented in a heartfelt manner that correspondents from major networks will do well to learn from. Who knows, networks may one day even remove the bias they tend to possess and air a real, rather than pre-conceived, insight into the Middle East. His language, a mixture of criticism, lament and helplessness, should prompt us to re-think not only what makes the news, but why the headlines are reported in such a manner. Should readers adopt a more sceptical approach towards consuming the international news reporting process, then Luyendijk’s contribution is that journalism can rightfully be regarded as a craft.’
David Calleja, Foreign Policy Journal
‘It conveys a disturbing truth that many in the media business refuse to confront: essentially, that they’re complicit in a monumental lie, a fi ction more worthy of Hollywood than the honourable business of digging up the truth, exposing the guilty through fi rst-hand investigation, shaming wrongdoers and presenting accurately the world as it is, warts and all, in all its beauty and misery … The ordinariness and frequency of what he reveals has become acceptable as the daily norm, whereas it should shock us all as journalists – the fact that reportage has largely given way to expediency, and hard-edged reality to neat, pre-digested, homogenised capsules of sanitised “concern”.’
Tony Maniaty, Australian Journalism Review
» All reviews for this title‘Written with great knowledge and humour. One hopes this will be read by everyone who has a fixed opinion or solution of the conflict in the Middle East. Rises high above the average correspondent book.’
Trouw
