Some British media organisations are trying to manipulate the news in an attempt to tarnish the reputation of the Gulf States and sell a message of crisis and chaos during the Iran attacks.
They are even willing to reward journalists working in the region to play along with the industry’s dark agenda by paying them to create controversy, even anonymously.
Any truthful articles penned by reporters who have experienced the past two weeks and shone a more positive message are being targeted in a desperate effort to ridicule their work.
The GDN has seen correspondence from one major British publisher that highlights the dirty tricks that are being played and the money being offered to concoct a narrative they seem determined to sell to readers and online followers.
Feature writer Isabel Oakeshott had two articles published in the UK’s Spectator and The Telegraph about her experiences after the UAE was targeted, like Bahrain, by incoming Iranian missiles and drones.
One piece was headlined: ‘I love Dubai. Get over it’ and she wrote: ‘I am in Dubai where we are doing our best to keep calm and carry on. Granted, the sudden instruction to ‘seek immediate shelter’ in the early hours of Sunday morning was unnerving, but with the exception of excitable ‘influencers’, few people are cowering in their basements’.
It was not the sort of picture some newspaper groups wanted to portray, even if it happened to be true.
Robbie Smith, Associate Opinion Editor of The i Paper, wrote to one freelance contributor: “So what we’re looking for is a writer to say that the journalist Isabel Oakeshott is wrong when she said life is basically completely fine at the moment despite the ‘odd cruise missile’.”
He suggested it might be something ‘to write anonymously’, adding: “We’re looking for 800 words and a fee of £300.”
Journalists across the Gulf region have been horrified by the antics. “How is this considered journalism?” said Natasha D’Souza, a Dubai-based business journalist, speaker, executive coach and contributor to the Harvard Business Review.
And Katy Gillett, a British UAE-based journalist, writer and editor with almost two decades of experience across a variety of platforms and brands, including The National, told the GDN: “I had a British newspaper journo reach out to me for some background research and she didn’t listen to a word I said – still did a story making out that influencers are being paid to promote ‘business as normal’.”
Some journalists are hitting back. Frank Kane, yesterday wrote an opinion column for Arabian Gulf Business Insight, and said: “Over the past 10 days, as missiles and drones have streaked across Gulf skies and air defence systems have worked around the clock, the British media has discovered an altogether different story.
“It involves a curious creature, eagerly hunted by tabloid hacks as well as the patrician BBC: the Dubai ‘expat influencer tax-evading dog abuser’, he continued.
“This individual appears as the central character in British press coverage of the crisis in the Gulf. As Iranian missiles have been intercepted and drones destroyed, the narrative that has fascinated editors thousands of miles away has not been life in a city under fire, nor energy markets, nor the strategic implications for the Strait of Hormuz.
“It has been the supposed panic of Instagram entrepreneurs fleeing a city built on tax avoidance and abandoned pets.”
A journalist from a British tabloid confirmed the dynamic to him over coffee just last week. He had been sent to report on ‘expat panic’. The difficulty, he admitted, was that he had not actually seen much panic.
Dubai was quieter than usual, yes. Some tourists had left early. But the city was functioning, restaurants were open and most residents were getting on with their lives.
The tabloid’s news desk was unimpressed. “Find panic,” he was told.
Gulf-based journalists have set up a MENA editorial support WhatsApp group to voice their angst and share insights into the challenges faced by senior newsmen and women in covering the Iran attacks and trying to avoid the plague of Blighty buffoonery.
One asked: “I should know the answer to this, but why is the Daily Mail group so anti-Dubai?”
The writer shall remain anonymous, just to keep in the spirit of this article. The i Paper is owned by dmg media, a subsidiary of DMGT (Daily Mail and General Trust) owned and controlled by Jonathan Harmsworth, 4th Viscount Rothermere.
Lord Rothermere had an unsuccessful publishing foray in the UAE with a free newspaper and website called 7Days which closed in 2016 and there were plans to launch a ‘Daily Mail for the Gulf’ in Saudi Arabia around that time that never materialised.
The company does, however, boast an extensive exhibitions arm which regularly froths over the region’s prowess and positivity to help draw in business.
To be fair and accurate, GDN Media gave Mr Smith and his Editor-in-Chief Oliver Duff and, for good measure, dmg media’s communications director, Katie Bryne, the opportunity to comment.
Did they consider their actions as an example of fair and accurate journalism and has dmg media a deliberately negative bias editorial policy when it comes to coverage of the Gulf States?
They did not respond.
editor@gdnmedia.bh
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