Hello Everybody!: One Journalists Search for Truth in the Middle East Pdf

FREE HELLO EVERYBODY!: ONE JOURNALISTS SEARCH FOR TRUTH IN THE MIDDLE EAST PDF

Goodreads helps you keep track of books you want to read. Want to Read saving…. Want to Read Currently Reading Read. Other editions. Enlarge cover. Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Open Preview See a Problem? Details if other :. Thanks for telling us about the problem. Return to Book Page. Preview — Het zijn net mensen by Joris Luyendijk. Het zijn net mensen: beelden uit het Midden-Oosten by Joris Luyendijk. Vijf jaar lang was Joris Luyendijk correspondent voor de Arabische wereld. Hij liep vluchtelingenkampen af en sloppenwijken, joodse nederzettingen en fundamentalistische bolwerken. Hij sprak met terroristen en bezetters, met slachtoffers, daders en Hello Everybody!: One Journalists Search for Truth in the Middle East familie. Hij doorstond beschietingen en bombardementen, doodsbedreigingen en zelfmoordaanslagen, bezetting, terreur en oor Vijf jaar lang was Joris Luyendijk correspondent voor de Arabische wereld. Hij doorstond beschietingen en bombardementen, doodsbedreigingen en zelfmoordaanslagen, bezetting, terreur en oorlog… Hoe meer hij zelf meemaakte, hoe meer het begon te knagen. Want wat gaapte er een kloof tussen wat hij als correspondent met eigen ogen zag, en wat hij daarvan kon laten zien op radio, tv en in de krant. In Het zijn net mensen probeert Luyendijk iets van die kloof te dichten. Met pakkende voorbeelden en vol humor Hello Everybody!: One Journalists Search for Truth in the Middle East hij uit waarom het zo moeilijk is om iets van het Midden-Oosten te begrijpen, en welke rol de massamedia daarin spelen. Get A Copy. Paperbackpages. More Details Original Title. Other Editions Friend Reviews. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. To ask other readers questions about Het zijn net mensenplease sign up. Did this book age well? I'm just sceptic about reading a politics book 10 years after this publication. Stephanie Josine I think so. A lot of it is more about human nature, bias, the practical implications of living in a dictatorship, and the charade of news media - thes …more I think so. A lot of it is more about human nature, bias, the practical implications of living in a dictatorship, and the charade of news media - these things are timeless truths. That said, I'm really curious about the impact of the Arab Spring on the information landscape in the places where this book is set. See 1 question about Het zijn net mensen…. Lists with This Book. Community Reviews. Showing Average rating 4. Rating details. More filters. Sort order. Start your review of Het zijn net mensen: beelden uit het Midden-Oosten. I read this book to preview it for possible inclusion in a reading series about war and peace in the Middle East. It's the kind Hello Everybody!: One Journalists Search for Truth in the Middle East book I almost certainly wouldn't have picked up otherwise - it's nonfiction about politics in the Middle East. I don't really have a political brain and I find it difficult and tedious, and frankly, boring to follow the intricacies of this particular sport. But Luyendijk's book is different. He is a former M. He stepped away from journalism to reflect on the huge gap between what is actually happening in the region and what is reported in the media. He explains the reasons for the difference in clear and convincing terms. His analysis of the media machine is both insightful and damning. Read this if you care about the U. Read it if you think you don't care about the U. Either way, it is a thought-provoking yet readable book. A note about why you may not have heard of this book: This book was originally published inin Dutch. The Hello Everybody!: One Journalists Search for Truth in the Middle East translation came out in with an afterword by the author. He mentions that while the book sold an amazing quarter million copies in the Netherlands and was well received in Denmark, France, Germany and Australia, it has been ignored in the U. Of course, I always have to take WorldCat holdings with a grain of salt. My academic library's copy - which I have in hand - isn't reflected there yet. It's a new acquisition and I'm not sure how frequently WorldCat holdings are updated. But still If you're a librarian, order this book! It should be on shelves. Update February Hello, Everybody! View 1 comment. Sep 15, Jan Hidders rated it it was amazing. A great little book. In my opinion a must-read for anyone who would like to claim to have an informed opinion on the situation in the Middle East. It is written in a very personal and fluent style, which makes it a very pleasant read. Although short, it is a very informative book about the difficulties that Joris experienced as a reporter in the Middle East while attempting to report as objectively and honestly as possible. Through a combination of personal anecdotes and additional background inf A great little book. Through a combination of personal anecdotes and additional background information he shows why this is next to impossible. He mentions several factors such as the local dictatorial regimes that make normal news gathering impossible, Western prejudices, the way that modern mass media filters certain Hello Everybody!: One Journalists Search for Truth in the Middle East of news, but also the differences in competence of the involved parties in executing effective media policies. These are all things that most of us already were at least vaguely aware of, but it is still very confronting to see these mechanisms directly at work in this book. A strong reminder that we cannot take the objectivity of our media for granted. This book is by a more experienced journalist and has a much bigger scope both in terms of history and geography, but it shares the almost palpable anger and frustration about the whole situation. I can also recommend this book, especially if you are interested in more "on the ground stories" by reporters in the Arab world. It is however very thick, and as such per page not very informative, but this is compensated by a very direct and personal writing style that clearly shows his personal involvement and the spectacular anecdotes such as his interview with Bin Laden or the time he was all but lynched by a mob of Afghan refugees in Hello Everybody!: One Journalists Search for Truth in the Middle East. Foreign correspondence, especially that reportage from the Middle East and other redoubts of dictatorship, is a house of cards. People Like Ushowever, is more than a simple accounting of his time on the ground. Readers might be forgiven for looking to another more influential critic of the news business, the former New Yorker journalist A. The rest is publicity. Luyendijk writes about his former profession in the same jaded way that an ex-wife might air out the dirty laundry of her former spouse. And though one sided, his account is refreshingly forthright in a way that a current journalist could never be. He very candidly describes his inability to reestablish friendships with ordinary Egyptians that he had met while earlier studying at university there. He says that absent those work-a-day relationships, it was impossible for him to report norms, only distortions. Rather than being a participant- observer, in the classic model of anthropology, he was doomed to be only a removed onlooker. Being likened to an anthropologist may be the highest form of praise any journalist can receive. But in reading People Like Us it becomes readily apparent that the discipline of anthropology may even be a more appropriate course of study than journalism school for aspiring foreign reporters. One suspects that his remove from those people he was reporting about is not unique to journalists, but to diplomats as well. At the Hello Everybody!: One Journalists Search for Truth in the Middle East time, Luyendijk has a playful and light-hearted streak when it comes to his work. In another moment, he relates how he would playfully mock his Palestinian interlocutors who suspected that a Jewish conspiracy could explain media coverage of the region. His examples Hello Everybody!: One Journalists Search for Truth in the Middle East from the Sudanese showing melted pill bottles at a pharmaceutical factory just struck by a U. With convincing detail, he describes the media life cycle of a terrorist attack in Israel and also quotes a U. Robert McChesney, the noted scholar of American mass media might argue that the root of the problem lies not with editors, but with the corporatization of the news business. Others, such as National Public Radio reporter and media critic Brooke Gladstone, have suggested that we get the media we deserve, and that it is a reflection of ourselves. They demanded the dismantlement of the secret Western bank accounts in which dictators hoard their loot, and chanted slogans against the generous commissions that Western defense companies pay out to dictators and their entourages. Banners displayed protests against Western training and armament of the Arab secret services who torture and murder on a large scale. Hello Everybody! - Profile Books

People live vividly in the present tense, but are unable to cut themselves off from their past. And along the way, a first disoriented Emma is forced to grow up, find herself, and discover that even today, eastern marcher lords and their ladies, like everyone else, have many a dragon to slay before they can hope to secure their Hello Everybody!: One Journalists Search for Truth in the Middle East or riches. Much is left unsaid to outsiders, and more drama unfolds inside it than is apparent on the surface of poor concrete houses and chaotic family smallholdings. Later, hearing tales of past battles when touring their new hardscrabble domains, Emma asks why the village clansmen no longer spend their winters pursuing heavily-armed blood feuds. Buy it now! And producers of Turkish sitcoms, you need look no further for your next dramatic story. Dutch paperback and ebook versions can be bought from the publisher here. This is her second novel and fifth book. Her first novel, Happy Hello Everybody!: One Journalists Search for Truth in the Middle Eastpublished by Conserve incan be bought here. Does love really conquer all? Hooray, that a book this classy can still be written and published! The flowing writing style and the fine exploration of emotions, doubts and threatening situations complete the whole. I enjoyed it and while reading I felt that I was right there in Anatolia … five stars! The account of his five years reporting from the Middle East — on top of years of Arabic study — came out four years before my own Dining with al-Qaeda. The Middle East can be funny too. Luyendijk included pages of Arabic jokes in his book to help readers break out of news media- formed preconceptions of the region. I found Hello Everybody!: One Journalists Search for Truth in the Middle East book over-envious of the well-funded correspondents of the great U. In fact, I was jealous of him, I said, because any story he wrote would have a head start in getting closer to the truth because he was writing for an open-minded, well-educated, relatively neutral country like the Netherlands. To listen to a YouTube recording of our debate, please click on the photo. Back then, not having images from, say, Chechnya, meant that the deaths of thousands never even got on the TV news. At the same time, the neatly choreographed if sometimes deadly daily Arab-Israeli ballet of Palestinian stone throwers vs Israeli troops in a small corner of Ramallah — filmed by the global media and watched by spectators, both served by falafel sellers — made it seem as though the Middle East was ablaze with violence. An articulate modern-day Dutch embassy dragoman in the audience noted the paradox that there is now a plethora of film from Syria, but that these cellphone shorts have done little to blunt the violence ripping the country apart. Luyendijk doubted that this holy grail of per cent truth or objectivity could ever be attained. He proposed a better gold standard would be trustworthiness. Fed up with requests to come in on the fourth day of every crisis to criticise the media coverage, Luyendijk has moved to London and reinvented himself as an anthropologist of the banking business. After that Luyendijk says his next project will be the European Union and its native species, the Eurocrat. He has his work cut out. Maybe US reporters enjoyed somewhat more privileged access, but I think that over the years all of us were given less and less time with real decision makers in the region. Original review here. Real war-zones and men with guns are part of the landscape too. And so are expectations and agendas back in the newsroom. Two excellent new books describe some of the tricks and dilemmas of this trade. Hugh Pope left the field after nearly 30 years reporting for British and US news agencies and papers. Hello Everybody! Changing technology is part of this story: Pope is old enough to have filed copy by telex and fiddled with those crocodile clips used to attach early laptops to hotel phone lines. Luyendijk, using mobile phones and the internet from the start, recalls how Syrian censors blocked his Hotmail account and moved on to YouTube a few years later. Both fretted about how to deal with the pressure to deliver stories that filter, distort and manipulate reality. Notebooks bursting with hard-gained insights can count for little if the item has been pre-scripted according to stock assumptions and prejudices back at base in New York, London or Amsterdam. Pope is an accomplished linguist with Arabic, Persian and Turkish under his belt: he wears his learning lightly but it shows in the quality of his writing — short on pyrotechnics but long on understanding. Luyendijk is good on bridging the gap between the modern standard Arabic most foreigners study and the different dialects spoken in every country and region. Too little ability to speak means over-dependence on local fixers and translators on the payroll of the ministry of information. It was a short conversation. Email Address:. Hugh Pope Author, Reporter, Editor. Jessica JJ Lutz. Click to see on Amazon. Photo: Jak den Exter. Follow Blog via Email Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email. Join other followers. Links Amazon. Top Create a free website or blog Hello Everybody!: One Journalists Search for Truth in the Middle East WordPress. Post to Cancel. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use. To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy. Joris Luyendijk - Wikipedia

Many journalists have mid-life crises when they begin to doubt their capacity to capture the truth in words or escape the media echo chamber. Joris Luyendijk had his crisis early — when he was 31, to be precise. A book that sought to demonstrate that it was almost impossible for a journalist to say anything worthwhile about the Middle East, where societies are closed, sources are often in the pay of the secret service, and western media lack the patience to get to grips with "the Arab world", a term he in any case rejects. That book, published in the Netherlands in and in the UK last year with the title Hello Everybody! He also says the Israelis' media savvy makes it easy for them to win the propaganda war with the Palestinians, and that in the Gulf war "the authoritative Anglosphere media adopted the perspective of the American PR machine". Hello Everybody! It's an insider's guide to the impossibility of seeing the whole picture, of getting inside the houses — and the minds — of those living on the "Arab street". And Luyendijk, who did a PhD in anthropology in Cairo, speaks Arabic — or at least the urban slang that passes Hello Everybody!: One Journalists Search for Truth in the Middle East Arabic in Egypt's capital. Plenty of Middle East correspondents don't. Middle East dictatorship and western media dumbness make a potent mix, hopelessly biased against understanding. But now back home in the Netherlands and calling himself a "meta-journalist" — a term, he says, that is guaranteed to empty rooms — he thinks he may be edging towards a solution. This should be worth hearing. I spent a long time in the Middle East and have to offer you something," Luyendijk says when I arrive at his office, slap bang in the middle of Amsterdam's red light district. He disappears and comes back a few minutes later with a perfectly executed espresso. He shares a floor of a three-storey building with a group of freelance writers and designers — "it's like a newsroom, but without the hierarchy," he tells me. Add his good looks, angular cheekbones and spiky, close-cropped hair to this burgeoning portfolio career, and I think I'm starting to dislike him as much as the politicians, lobbyists, PR people and journalists skewered in his new book. His main focus over the last couple of years, however, has not been the book, but an attempt to develop a new way of doing journalism. One legacy of his time in the Middle East was a belief that oil added to the problems of the region, fostering autocracy, corruption and an arms race. He is also interested in sustainability, so started a weekly column on electric cars in NRC Handelsblad. I knew nothing about electric cars, but they seemed great, so I began an experiment Hello Everybody!: One Journalists Search for Truth in the Middle East see if you could seduce readers to go along with your curiosity, rather than saying from a pedestal: 'This is the truth about the electric car. At the outset, he wanted to test whether Hello Everybody!: One Journalists Search for Truth in the Middle East would be a good idea for NRC Handelsblad to be distributed solely by electric cars. If I'd done an interview and it was hopelessly boring and the PR person tried to inflate it, I would write about the attempts of the PR person to inflate it, rather than go along with the inflation. Then you become the protagonist in your own story, and you write about the obstacles in your way to becoming sustainable. NRC Handelsblad was being sold and it all became too bureaucratic and complicated. But rather than abandon all the material and contacts he had gathered, he got in touch with a software company that specialised in staging internet dialogues between experts and building "mind maps" to establish areas of consensus between them. Suddenly, he saw a new way of doing journalism: instead of a journalist talking to half a dozen "experts" holding a range of Hello Everybody!: One Journalists Search for Truth in the Middle East and trying to come to a reasonable conclusion based on what they say, he would let them talk to each other and allow conclusions to emerge organically. He thought this would be a way to see the whole picture, and could be applied to many areas beyond the relatively restricted one of electric cars. This is a way of establishing what people agree about and where there are areas of meaningful disagreement. If you bring in lots of people, you can filter out the biased stuff. His electric car project is now heading for a new life — on the internet, where it will be the first of what he hopes will be a series of "agoras" the agora was the place of assembly and debate in the ancient Greek city-states. The metaphor of an agora in cyberspace, where experts and interested lay people meet to thrash out issues concerning the electric car or oil, energy, sustainability, the Middle Eastis captivating: an online world peopled by Hello Everybody!: One Journalists Search for Truth in the Middle East rather than geeks; an ocean that might, after all, be navigable. Luyendijk says "the old model of journalism is broken" — but so what? It didn't really work anyway. If you are an expert, you go in at one point; if you are a novice, you enter somewhere else. The whole idea of what an article is will change. This is what we're doing now. We have the horse carriage, which is the story. We stick it on the internet, and we think: 'Ha, that's it. What papers do at the moment is collect stories that were written for a paper knowing that tomorrow fish will be in the paper, and they just dump them on the web. But we need a completely different way of presenting them. Papers, he believes, will disappear, though he offers no timescale. Once they have gone, the rationale for the "story" goes, too. One of the central conclusions of Hello Everybody! In every situation, there are many stories, depending on your perspective. Luyendijk quit conventional journalism because he was always being railroaded into telling a linear story, packaged for one-off consumption. In the new net world, he believes, it will be possible to tell many stories, work on their development with other people in the agora via crowdsourcing, be open about saying "I don't know", be provisional in drawing conclusions, and endlessly return to the same subject. The agora exists in perpetuity; the debate never ends. Luyendijk shows no interest in the subject that obsesses Hello Everybody!: One Journalists Search for Truth in the Middle East organisations: how to make this transition work financially. If you're going to innovate and from day one you have to explain how that's going to make money, it's not going to fly. I don't think I'd have had any of the ideas with the electric car if I'd been thinking commercially. You won't have ideas if your first angle is, how is this going to make money? The start-up costs of the agora site are being underwritten by the Dutch lottery, and some income is coming from chairing panel discussions on sustainability issues, but he just trusts that in the longer term a financial model will emerge. Luyendijk, who is now 38 and married with three young children, sees himself as an anthropologist who stumbled into journalism by accident when Dutch newspaper Volkskrant signed him up to report on the Middle East in on the strength of his book about Egypt, A Good Man Sometimes Hits His Wife he has a winning way with titles. Volkskrant did not see the job as especially significant. That catastrophe made him as a journalist — but it broke him, too, because he came to disbelieve the pretensions of journalism. Now he is groping for a new way of telling stories, of embracing complexity. I ask him what he thinks he'll be doing 10 years from now. I'm making a lot of enemies now [with the new book], so maybe I'll be living in a different country. An old-style interview would have a neat conclusion or killer quote with which to finish. But I am tiring after an early flight, the interview rather dribbles away and, in any case, old-style journalism is dying. There is no neat conclusion; no killer quote; no dramatic denouement; just a rather spurious full stop. Digital media. Joris Luyendijk: 'The old model of journalism is broken'. How can journalism meet the challenges of the internet age? Former reporter Joris Luyendijk is looking for new ways to tell stories. Watch a video interview with Joris Luyendijk. Stephen Moss.