The case of Reuters in Yemen

By: Tomwfinn

Mohamed Sudam looks on as President Saleh greets former US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice.This week Reuters ran into trouble when it surfaced that one of their local Yemeni reporters, Mohammed Sudam, was also working as the president’s personal translator and secretary. Reuters had known about his presidential interpreting work for years (Sudam having informed them) but they continued working with him as a part-time stringer.

This would likely still have been the case had Sudam not been kidnapped in October byAli Mohsen, a powerful renegade general backing the anti-Saleh protesters. When a group of Yemeni journalists went to demand his release they were told by General Mohsen that Sudam had been kidnapped “as an employee of the president, not as a journalist.” Mohsen’s response triggered a flurry of conflicting media reports describing Sudam as a government official and/or Reuters reporter.Shocked to hear that both descriptions were true a group of young Yemenis living abroad (most notably @DoryEryani) launched a relentless twitter blitzkrieg using the hashtag #ShameOnReuters to try and attract attention.

Some of the tweeps claimed to detect evidence of pro-government bias in Sudam’s reports. Having followed Sudam’s reporting myself for over a year, large parts of which have focused on government troops attacking and killing unarmed protesters; I’m not so convinced.In any case, the point is not whether or not Sudam’s reporting was bias, but rather, as Brian Whitaker pointed out, that Sudam’s double employment (by both Reuters and the president of Yemen) creates the appearance of a conflict of interest and risks jeopardizing Reuters’ credibility and its relationship of trust with the public.The story took on a more serious dimension when the New York Times, Al-Jazeera andthe Washington Post latched on and published stories of their own. Yesterday Reuters bowed to the pressure, announcing that they would no longer be using Sudam to report from Yemen:

“Sudam’s work as a Reuters stringer [non-staff correspondent] over the course of many years has been fair and accurate. When he became a translator for the president, he disclosed his role to Reuters. On reviewing the matter, however, we believe it’s not appropriate to use a stringer who is also working for the government. He is no longer reporting for us from Yemen.”

So what should we make of it all? So far most of the attention has been focused on the #ShameOnReuters twitter campaign. Many have touted it as another success story for Twitter, demonstrating the power of this new form of social media to mobilize, attract attention, and bring about change.AJE Stream – #ShameOnReuters in YemenBut what I think is more interesting and perhaps more important is what the incident says about the state of journalism in countries like Yemen and the implications that it has for foreign news organizations like Reuters who are trying to report on them.Journalists have a pretty tough time in Yemen. Some are faced by intimidation and arrest, most are unable to make a living out of their profession and end up taking on more than one job.Hasan al-Haifi, one of Yemen’s most outspoken political commentators, also an interpreter, believes it is possible to maintain a separation between his two fields of work, even though the latter involves working closely with the government.

He told me:  “I work frequently for the government and for people I don’t like, but that does not affect my journalism, I maintain a separation between the two. Without my interpreting work I would not be able to afford to work as a journalist.”In contrast to countries like the US, journalists here do not tend to separate their reporting from their political leanings.”Every journalist here in Yemen has a political position, this is not good, but it’s the way it is,” said Nasser Arraybee, a journalist who writes for the government-owned, Yemen Observer. A number of other Yemeni journalists I spoke to said they’d known about Sudam’s dual employment for years and saw no conflict of interest between the two.Others accept that there was a problem with Sudam’s position. “Clearly there was a question of neutrality,” says the Yemen Times’ Ali Saeed, “but Reuters ought to have discharged him when he took up his job with the president not because people on twitter complained about it.

”Of course journalistic ethics in Yemen are not the same as those at Reuters but there is a dilemma for these guys here: how to find a reliable, well-informed local stringer in a country where there is no such thing as independent or impartial media and where ‘what you know’ is intimately linked to ‘who you know.’Others like Al-Jazeera Arabic (who rely heavily on reporters affiliated with Yemen’s Islamic opposition party, the Islah) and the BBC (who previously employed Mohammed Sudam) are faced with the same predicament.With so few foreign journalists based in or visiting Yemen, the outside world relies primarily on the wire services (AP, AFP and Reuters) for their information.

The wires, faced with financial burdens of their own, rely increasingly on local stringers to gather information and report for them. I think most would agree that this is a good thing. Local journalists have a better grasp of the language and complexities of the country than any foreigner is likely to get, not to mention a wealth of local contacts built up over the course of a lifetime. (Of course there are downsides: some don’t speak or write English and instead must dictate the news they have down the phone for the story to be written up by English-speaking journalists abroad.)If news agencies aren’t willing and/or cannot afford to send their own correspondents to foreign countries they ought to think more carefully about how they plan to continue reporting. I think investing some money in training for local journalists and syndicates would be a good place to start…