Wadah Khanfar

Wadah Khanfar is the Director General of the Al Jazeera Network.

Journalism

Khanfar has covered some of the the world's key political zones for the Al Jazeera Channel since 1997. Khanfar's first role in the organisation was as a correspondent in South Africa. In 2001/2002 he was a war correspondent in Afghanistan and during the war in Iraq, he reported from Kurdish-controlled territory in the North. Later, he was appointed as the Chief of the Baghdad Bureau and was successful in re-establishing the bureau in the wake of Iraq's new political landscape. Khanfar became Managing Director of the Al Jazeera Channel in 2003 and Director General of the Al Jazeera Network in 2006.

Academic Studies

Khanfar studied Engineering in Jordan and went on to post-graduate studies in Philosophy, African Studies, and International Politics.

Student Life

Khanfar studied Engineering between 1985 to 1990 at the University of Jordan. During this time Khanfar was =involved in a range of student activities which went on to have a definite political impact within Jordan. Early on he started a Student Union with a group of students and colleagues - the idea rapidly came to the attention of the Jordanian authorities. However, Khanfar continued and started an inter-university dialogue group amongst students constituted from a range of political backgrounds. Out of this debate and discussion emerged something called the Students Unity Initiative which was put up for a referendum across the different universities. More than 80% of the students at the universities voted in favor of the referendum. No doubt Khanfar’s ability to give exceptional speeches and rally the students had a part in this majority vote.

According to the Students Unity Initiative the students would start a student union in each university after which a national preparation committee for the general student union would finalize the constitution and the bylaws. Khanfar was elected Chairman of the National Preparation Committee for the constitution and started to initiate a process all over Jordan in order to motivate students of universities and community colleges to be part of it.

In 1989/1990 there was a great deal of discussion about the future of the democratic process and at the same time the parliamentary elections in Jordan started. This was the first initiative that the student unions actually initiated without political interference by political movements and political parties. Again, the most important element that put Khanfar forward as leader of this movement was his capability of delivering speeches being both articulate and motivational. He was noted as being on the forefront of organizing forums, protests, festivals and demonstrations for student rights .

Bureau Chief in Baghdad

Khanfar led the Al Jazeera Baghdad Bureau in Iraq which had more than a hundred employees - it was the biggest operation for Al Jazeera outside Al Jazeera’s Qatar headquarters and was the biggest media operation inside Iraq. Al Jazeera at that time became the first TV station to cover the developments inside Baghdad, inside Iraq, and became the main source of information about the early military attacks against the Americans. Khanfar was known to have a good relationship with all the political parties in Iraq as well as having a reputation for an impartial approach with all the political parties and ethnic groups, from the Kurds in the north to the Shia and the Sunni.

A critical issue to be noted in Khanfar’s career is his relationship with the US which became especially pronounced in his work as Bureau Chief of Al Jazeera in Baghdad. During that time the US administration started to heavily criticize Al Jazeera. The accusations ranged from allegations that the Channel had contacts with military groups active inside Iraq, to Al Jazeera inciting violence through showing tapes of military operations against the American army. The US subsequently made demands on the Channel to change its coverage. This led to tension for the Channel’s many journalists and crew resulting in Khanfar sending a letter to Paul Bremer. The letter asked the US to stop the intimidation campaign against Al Jazeera’s journalists, and to stop hindering and putting obstacles in front of them. During that time it became obvious that there were more and more pressures and atrocities being committed on Al Jazeera crews in Baghdad - Al Jazeera journalists and crew were at that time detained for days and sometimes for months in the Abu Ghraib prison and some of them were tortured as well.

Further US Pressure

The US pressure did not abate , the American and British criticism and accusations against Al Jazeera became greater. These accusations sometimes became aggressive to an extent that Rumsfeld and Bush in their press conferences started to officially criticize Al Jazeera and blame Al Jazeera for America’s failure to restore order in Iraq. It later came to the attention of the world that George Bush and Tony Blair discussed the idea of bombing Al Jazeera headquarters, supposedly before the attack on Fallujah in April, 2004.

Subsequently, the US pressure intensified on Qatar to alter Al Jazeera’s coverage and Al Jazeera’s editorial policy regarding Iraq. The US demanded that Al Jazeera stop broadcasting Osama Bin Ladin’s tapes, Al Qaeda tapes, and stop showing videos of military attacks against Americans. The Americans also demanded that Al Jazeera start showing positive news about the US army involvement in Iraq.

Khanfar is observed to have resisted the interference in the Channel’s editorial policy. To safeguard Al Jazeera editorial independence Khanfar, as a managing director, launched in 2004 the Al Jazeera Code of Ethics and Al Jazeera’s Code of Conduct in July 2004 at the First Al Jazeera International Forum. The Code insisted that professional standards and balanced and fair coverage should govern and guide the Channel’s newsroom rather than political or diplomatic interference. Khanfar went on to start the Quality Assurance Department to safegaurd Al Jazeera’s compliance with the articles of the Code. Colin Powell is noted to have commented on the initiative saying that Al Jazeera had taken a positive step but still needed to do more in the future. In response Khanfar stated that Al Jazeera had taken the initiative out of a commitment to the profession and media independence rather than to acquiesce to the wishes of any government.

Journalism of Depth

Khanfar coined the concept of 'Journalism of Depth' which refers to the idea that before being able to properly convey the meaning of facts and figures journalists need to contextualize events in their social, cultural, historical, and political context. He contrasts this to ‘headline culture’ which may convey a great deal of information but very little understanding. The background to Khanfar’s idea is that contemporary news media are in a crisis and are suffering from a range of critical problems. These problems include amongst other things superficiality, reductionism, media elitism, and dissociation from context. These problems have led to a new culture of looking at news - news has become fragmentary and chaotic rather than being informative and explanatory.

Khanfar states that at this moment in history, journalism of depth has become essential as there is a critical need to explain the sometimes devastating impacts of news events on citizens from one end of the world to the other. To interpret these events journalists need to have a deep knowledge of information surrounding events and the ability to put them in a historical, social and cultural context that goes beyond the headlines. This means that journalists have to adopt an attitude of spending more time in understanding the social and cultural fabric of the society or what he calls, ‘the mind of the nation’ that they are reporting about. Only then are they able to develop the type of journalism that has the capability to explain and perhaps even forecast the future of what might happen with a particular issue.

Superficialism

A news culture of headlines has led to people not being able to understand what truly is happening in a particular event or issue. For example, Khanfar questions why the professional news media failed in Iraq, and why both politicians and the public were misinformed. He believes that the media, both implicitly and explicitly, participated in misleading and misinforming people because of the mechanism of superficial journalism. Although Al Jazeera was criticized and attacked for its coverage in Iraq, it turned out to be correct in its reporting, and many international media organizations subsequently apologised for the simplicity and lack of depth of their coverage. Khanfar questions how well-established news organizations could fall into the errors of reporting without a sufficient level of depth?

Superficial journalism means that a journalist flies into country, spends a few days there and then starts reporting without sufficient knowledge. The main sources of information for him will be sources that are either official, through press conferences and briefings, or through intellectuals and analysts that are normally not representative of the main trend of the street. This results in an analysis of the situation that is superficial and not authentic (primarily because the journalist doesn’t have a proper understanding of the man in the street). It is disassociated and 'sterile' because it has very little to do with the actual issues and movement within the masses.

He cites that what happened in Iraq, as a result of this type of reporting, in that most of the media started reporting and repeating the same concepts and ideas without proper investigation and without proper understanding of the mind of the nation of the Iraqis. None of the major news organizations covering the events were able to see that the issue of Sunni, Shia, would evolve into a major issue, that the issue of destroying or dismantling of the army would lead into an insurgency or lead to the rise of hundreds of small military groups.

How does a journalist then get around this superficiality. He notes an example from his work with Al Jazeera in Iraq - what he did with Al Jazeera reporting was to adopt the principles of the journalism of depth. For example, most of journalists who were recruited to report about Iraq at that time were either Iraqis or were Arabs who understood the language, the culture, and the religious background of the nation. What they were reporting about resulted in much more deeper coverage and understanding of the issue than journalists that came from overseas and who did not understand the historical and cumulative experience of the nation. As a result, Al Jazeera was able to foresee what would happen much better than other news organizations. This is why the coverage of Al Jazeera was different and this is why the coverage of Al Jazeera was criticized by the American administration and by western governments because they saw in it something different than what they were used to seeing, and in essence, wanted everyone to repeat.

Terminology

Journalism of depth means that a journalist has to leave the most common used terminologies, cliches, and ideas and go much deeper beneath the surface to have the accumulative knowledge of the past which is history and culture and so on and be able to develop projected thinking for the future. Khanfar states that Al Jazeera was able to do so much better than other media organizations and they were able to warn people that what was currently happening in Iraq would lead to a very severe situation in the future.

Fieldwork

In various speaches, Khanfar has stated that in order to pursue journalism of depth, one has to adopt a different attitude towards the concept of reporters and fieldwork. Fieldwork here should not be journalists who are flown in from different parts of the world, who are alien to the culture and to the civilization that they are reporting from, who are only there in a rush to do a few reports and leave back to the comfort of their homes. Journalists should have a mission to sit down and understand, research, communicate, and break down the conceptual barriers between the reporter and the society.

By conceptual barrier what is meant is that a reporter should not look from above but from within the society, with the eyes of the people themselves not through the eyes of someone who is trying to practice some kind of superiority over or finding himself there on a mission. He blames news organizations themselves because the resources that they are making available are primarily technical spending millions of dollars on the technical side of the operation. They don’t spend a lot of money on the issue of education and training of journalists on how to understand the culture and the nation and so on.

Immediacy

Khanfar has stated that the whole concept of technical development has led to the phenomena of live reporting and immediate breaking news. Journalists by virtue of technology can reach areas where they normally can’t reach. While this is positive it has also had the negative consequence of focusing on technicalities rather than on concentrating on the conceptual framework of analysis. So live reporting for example, although it is wonderful tool because it reports events directly as they happen, at the same time deprives people from understanding the context. It focuses attention on the event itself and the immediacy of the event that doesn’t take into consideration the context in which this event has happened, perhaps in a context that could have been developing for the last few centuries or few decades to reach that point. So the audience when they look and see fragmented reality or a slice of reality they do not understand what is happening. The audience then sometimes resort to interpreting the events with common misperceptions that do not allow them to predict or foresee. More importantly, if the audience are politicians it can lead poor decision making in a given situation.

The Centre and the Periphery

Khanfar highlights that, to a large extent, news coverage concentrates on the centres of power, on the leaders who take decisions, on commanders of armies, on famous politicians, and political activists. This kind of reporting and concentration sometimes ignores the margin, the periphery. The periphery in societies like Iraq is extremely important because the periphery over time can develop, as was seen in many cases, into the alternative for the centre in a very short time. New faces in Iraq Harith al Dari or Muqtada Al Sadr were not known before and were not part of the centre initially. But suddenly they became leaders of the society and a many media organizations were ignorant of them because they had never had the proper knowledge of them. In contrast, Al Jazeera knew what the religious Shia hierarchy was and the importance that would play. They also understood the tribal Sunni fabric and how it could develop a new leadership. Meanwhile, western media continued to interview prominent figures who were known for decades for controlling the opposition to the Iraqi regime. A journalist who comes into a society can dig deep and understand the society and the trends of the society and be able to predict for the future what is likely to happen. This is not the journalist who will drive to the closest political party headquarter and interview the leader of that party and think that this is the end of the story.

Bias

Khanfar has stated that every reporter or every institution should be aware of their biases. Reporters should be able to understand their inherent biases through proper training and proper commitment to standards of journalism. This better ensures balanced reporting. A situation such as Iraq - whereby it was seen widely as a conflict between the western powers and the Arab and Muslim powers - showed heavy bias in reporting and most reporters could have been accused of being biased. The issue is not just to be aware of the bias but to proactively overcome the bias.