How much freedom do you have in reporting the news?

Wesam: ⁠⁠ I have freedom to a certain point, which means we can’t report the whole truth accurately. The freedom to report whatever we see wasn’t the case either before or during the war. As journalists, we self-sensor ourselves. Unfortunately, we have many parties that may punish any journalist that is honest and real. For me personally, since I am working for an American network, I experience trouble a lot. Many people look at me suspiciously and may harm me if I report about the whole truth.

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When you start work, what is the first thing you see everyday?

“Before leaving for work, I bid my children and wife farewell as if it were the last time, for I do not know if I will return to them or not. Upon arriving at work, I check that my colleagues are well and review the list of victims' names in case I know one of them or have lost a dear one. I also see the lines of displaced people standing every day since morning, whether to get water or bread, or in line to receive aid. The life of the displaced has turned into queues for the mere basics of living, including treatment at the hospital's gate, where there's a line to see a general doctor amidst the shortage that the city of Rafah suffers in clinics and hospitals.” – Saif Alswaitti

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The deficit in research funding has an enormous impact on the way ME/CFS is treated, or more accurately is not treated, by the medical community writ large. Physicians around the country simply lack the body of scientific knowledge needed to learn about the disease, to diagnose it and how to ease the suffering of patients until someone develops a cure.  “The reason that patients [have been] minimized for so long is because it’s very, very clear that this complex chronic illness doesn’t fit in this neat package of ‘Here’s an X-ray. You’ve got a broken tibia,’” says David Putrino, director of Mount Sinai’s center for complex chronic illness, who has been working with patients with Long Covid since early in the pandemic. “What we are finally proving, though, is that categorically. something is going wrong in the bodies of these people.” As he has gained more experience with the condition, he no longer believes a single medical trigger explains the full range of symptoms.

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The latest example of the linguistic duel came when President Biden publicly confused the leader of Egypt with the president of Mexico. Critics pounced, citing the mistake as evidence that the eighty-one year-old Biden was too old to occupy the White House for another four years. Biden’s defenders angrily responded with a “he does it, too” defense, pointing to similar verbal stumbles by Biden’s likely opponent, the seventy-seven year-old former President Donald Trump. He recently confused his Republican primary opponent Nikki Haley with Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the California Democrat and former Speaker of the House. Is this behavior really the way we want to experience the contest for the nation’s highest office? If so, we’re destined to descend into a giant game of gotcha journalism with snarky reporters focused on irrelevance. Let’s emphasize what the candidates have done, not what they say.

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Johnson and his thin Republican majority in the House, egged on by Donald Trump, the front runner for the GOP presidential nomination, oppose doing anything. Their answer to the problem is a political stunt calling for the impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary Alexander Mayorkas. Like political puppies, the hard right of the Republican party want to reward their big dog with a bone -- an issue he can use to bludgeon Biden in the upcoming election. This is cynical politics. Immigrant kids on the streets pay the price for a political game that also would deny aide to Ukrainians trying to fight Russia. Let’s not forget. Trump had four years in the White House to fix an immigration issue that has festered for years. He produced nothing but bluster. I’m not wild about Biden’s plan, but at least he has one. Do you think Trump and his howling hounds will succeed?

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Artifact burst on to the scene about a year ago. It promised to provide a large online platform where journalists could post their stories, broaden their audience, and enhance revenues, assuming Artifact’s AI-enabled tools found value in – and an audience – the content. I wasn’t too impressed by their initial efforts, but I decided to use Artifact and give it a chance. It was designed to capitalize on machine learning to customize the reader’s feed and fashion a news report. It didn’t take me too long to pull the plug. Most of the content tended to be superficial and shallow. Artifact’s lack of journalistic quality raises a larger point, though. As Ben Thompson, the technology blogger and an early Artifact enthusiast recently said, “maybe there’s just not enough good content on the internet!”

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I’m not alone in saying Trump’s actions disqualify him and that he should be kicked off the ballot. That’s what the Colorado Supreme Court said. Even legal scholars who are members of the conservative Federalist Society, such as William Baude of the University of Chicago, and Michael Stokes Paulson of the University of St. Thomas, agree. No matter how much Trump tries to weasel out of the controversy, he broke the law and should pay for his crimes just like the insurrectionists who prompted legislators to write Section Three: Confederate soldiers who rebelled against the United States in the Civil War. Trump doesn't deserve the right to run for the highest office in the land. He gave that away on January sixth.

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Jack Smith has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to settle the matter and to schedule oral arguments early this year. The high court should rule quickly before the election heats up. Trump also should be tried soon so voters know before the elections whether a candidate for the nation's highest public office violated laws in our constitution, democracy's most sacred document. Until those charges are settled, he should not be on the ballot. Being treated equally is a crucial principle of our democracy. The law says anyone who tries to overthrow the government should not hold high public office. Trump and his supporters must be shown that laws are not things they can obey when they feel like it. The rule of law should prevail. He should only be on the ballot once he and Jack Smith have their day in court.

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A recent Telegram post shows how easily the twin enemies of truth – deceit and propaganda – fill the gaps created by heavy-handed censorship of the media in a bloody, directionless war that has killed thousands of innocent people and displaced millions of others. If there’s a void in solid, professionally edited media, the Telegram post shows how purveyors of propaganda will rush to fill it. We will probably see much of the same thing in America as the 2024 presidential campaign gets underway. To say that the post, titled 72 Virgins – Uncensored, is problematic is to state the obvious. Less well known to audiences around the world are the policies that make legitimate media vulnerable to the credibility gaps that make the propaganda pervasive.

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News coverage of the drama over Sam Altman’s ouster as CEO of OpenAI overshadows the most important question we should be asking about artificial intelligence: How can we oversee a technology expanding at the speed of light while the public’s still in the dark?  Ever since the board of OpenAi fired Altman on November seventeenth, media coverage focused on the corporate soap opera that prompted the decision to fire and then rehire Altman. Speculation dominated coverage of the company and its board until the New York Times recently published a definitive piece on Altman, exposing the backstabbing and deceit that prompted the board to act.

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Even this far away from the election, there are signs around the country that Trump’s influences are already affecting how the Republican Party will behave. Those Republicans who were loudly supportive of Trump’s election theft claim did not fare well in the midterm elections. But I don’t think they learned their lesson. His influence played out in the House Republican's stumbling effort to elect a new speaker, after tossing out the first one. Trump’s current theme is that Joe Biden is a threat to Democracy. Watch how that starts popping up all over as the campaign proceeds. Trump will be trying to offset the fact that he is the one formally accused of trying to stage a coup. Message echoing is a common tactic, and the man knows how to make echoes.

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Generative AI is a revolutionary technology that will change the world and is evolving at lightening speed. With the capitalists in charge, the speed of AI development will probably accelerate as will its offspring, ChatGPT. For-profit operations are nimbler and lure better talent to wrestle with evolving technologies with so much potential. I witnessed how seeking investors is much easier than asking for donations. There’s a downside to the capitalist approach, though. Dangling the prospects of huge profits on the horizon is a powerful incentive to diminish the importance of the social consequences of AI, which can be significant.

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I experience the war through the eyes of Marwan Athamneh who manages the Jerusalem bureau of the Middle East Broadcasting Networks (MBN), where I am chairman of the board. Every day Athamneh monitors the conditions of MBN journalists in Gaza, the West Bank, the northern and southern borders of Israel and the conditions in Jerusalem, where tensions between Arab citizens of Israel and Israelis run high. When he can get to the office, Athamneh runs studios for Alhurra, the main MBN broadcast outlet that airs its reports in Arabic. He also struggles to keep up with the logistical needs of MBN war correspondents.  

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My Israeli friend and I enjoyed lunch and conversation on a sunny patio crammed with holiday tourists who had flocked to booths adjacent to the restaurant for a street fair where children could get face paints. I couldn’t imagine how the scene of such a joyous reunion would be shattered within days. We struggled to overcome the banter from nearby tables as we caught up on years past, on common friends and shared experiences. We took a short walk to her office before we bid a fond farewell. My Palestinian friend picked me up and drove me through a city he calls home and one I had visited often.

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Censorship and government control of the media characterize all markets Middle East Broadcasting Networks serve to one degree or another. In some places, breaking the rules set by government media officials can lead to time in a jail cell or even a death sentence. Dubai and the UAE, the confederation of Arab enclaves in which the city is located, are a bit different, though. You can say practically anything you want about anybody as long as the subject doesn’t involve the Sheikhs that control the place.

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I spent time with Tharwat Shagrah just days before war broke out in Israel when Hamas, a militant group, unleashed its savage attack, killing hundreds of innocent people leading Israel to pulverize Hamas’s base in retaliation. The brutality that Hamas executed in the deadly exchanges in the Gaza Strip deserves the international condemnation it generated. But the violence also overshadows the legitimate Palestinian grievances that Tharwat deals with every day on her West Bank news beat. Indeed, Israel’s callous treatment of West Bank Palestinians is at the heart of the long-simmering conflict.

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Hamas’ surprise attack on Israel isn’t the only thing on the minds of Lebanese people. They are struggling with political chaos orchestrated by a militant political movement that seems more interested in helping stage attacks on Israel than dealing with a wrenching economic crisis at home. Nothing symbolizes the frustrations voiced to me here in Beirut more than the gaping hole in the center of the city’s downtown where the world’s largest non-nuclear explosion destroyed tie city’s port and reduced much of Beirut to ash.

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Erbil occupies a strategic geographical hot spot that borders Iran on the east, Turkey on the north, Syria to the west and Iraq to the south. As solid an ally as America will get in the region, Kurdistan’s soldiers, known as the peshmerga, helped repel ISIS forcers in Iraq after the terrorist group’s surprise and bloody drive to within thirty miles of Baghdad in 2014. I first traveled to the Kurdish region as a journalist for the Chicago Tribune nearly thirty years ago. At the time, I felt I had stepped back into biblical times.

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One of the first women the CFPA had helped was Omaima Zaki, a victim of a “blank check” scheme. Zaki, who was pregnant at the time, filled out a check that had been given her so she could raise $500. “She didn’t know what she was doing,” Hassan said. “She had never filled out a check and didn’t realize she had taken out a loan with interest. When Zaki couldn’t repay the loan, Emad Hannazy, said a loan shark filed charges of default against her in a local Egyptian court. She was sentenced to seven years in prison.

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All cities have trash problems, some worse than Tunis. But Saied’s government compounds the problems with polices that are designed to make Tunisia Europe’s trash bin, according to investigations by Alhurra, an Middle East Broadcasting Networks (MBN) broadcast outlet, and others. “At times,” Hussein Elrazzaz said, “the debris ends up being dumped into the Mediterranean Sea. Trash is becoming as big a business as human trafficking.”

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