Media and the World Economic Forum on the Middle East 2009 in Jordan

This is a guest post by Kyle Christie, a blogger, political analyst and student of journalism. He writes at The Christie Communiqués and Through the Middle East.

Yesterday saw the end of the World Economic Forum’s meeting on the Middle East, held on the banks of the dead sea in Jordan. A range of panel discussions took place, and you can find reports on ‘Sustainability in the Middle East, Middle East E-Living‘ and ‘Closing the food gap among them.

If you really want, you can also see photos from Flickr of the conference.

There was also a panel discussion on ‘Race for an Audience: Media in the Middle East‘, the (hour and a half long) video of which can be seen here (sorry, embedding didn’t work).

By the end of the forum, the participants challenged themselves in two areas, as the Dubai Chronicle reports:

Energy – increase conservation; develop alternative energies; and utilize smart grids.

Youth – with 65% of the Arab world’s population under the age of 25, the region must develop this bulge by “providing them with education and developing, retaining and attracting talent,” said Samir Brikho, Chief Executive Officer, Amec, United Kingdom, and Co-Chair of the meeting.

For a critical opinon of the World Economic Forum, see ‘Leftist Youth’ writing at 7iber.com, a Jordanian website for young citizen journalists.

Unfortunately, there was little talk of micro-payment projects or, beyond the above discussion which is well worth watching, much discussion of the role of the media in the Middle East. Obviously the World Economic Forum can be expected to have other things on it’s mind – petrodollars and the wider recession – but press freedom and a focus on developing the Middle East (where there is still widespread poverty) are issues worthy of greater, more expansive debate.

Children and the credit crunch

Children are a demographic not normally associated with financial problems. That said, as far as vulnerable sections of the population go, they rank pretty high. The BBC has asked children around the world how the financial crisis has affected them, as well as what they think of the G20 summit and it actually makes pretty interesting reading. Video here. The Cruncharama map is best, though I wish I’d had the vision to trademark that name…

It’s good to see that the environment gets plenty of attention from these kids and that they’re thinking beyond their own households. There’s some pretty sound political analysis going on, too. A student from Bassam Schools in Ad Dammam, Saudi Arabia said of the G20 that ‘it is not a matter of money but a matter of time.’

Also, kudos to the Beeb for running decent world news for children at all. After all, everyone knows that Newsround is the only place for intelligible current affairs coverage.

Photo by BBPANTONE, via Flickr (Creative Commons).

A few thoughts on apocalypticism and the financial crisis

I don’t care if it isn’t a real word. Apocalypticism is what’s going on here. I’ve been reading the latest issue of Prospect magazine and this month’s cover story is entitled ‘After Capitalism’. I understand that this is hyperbole and that it might seem like I’m attacking a straw man, but I shudder to think how people in years to come-people who aren’t yet alive-are going to look back on this. We’re going to look very silly indeed. One financial crisis (granted, we don’t yet know how serious it will be) and we (or the mainstream media, at least) react as if the entire system has collapsed, or should. Have I not been paying attention properly? Is this the final, inevitable rise of the proletariat and I just didn’t notice?

Prospect is not alone in this. The Daily Telegraph, The Times, The Independent, The Guardian – in fact, just about all of Fleet Street have been at it. Even the Davos delegates joined in, while the normally sober FT declared that this is a matter of survival.

There is an important distinction to be made between a crisis of capitalism (or capitalism being in a state of crisis) and a discrete crisis occurring within capitalism. There is no doubt that we are experiencing a systemic crisis, but capitalism isn’t just a system. At the risk of sounding overdramatic, capitalism is an idea and no-one really thinks that the idea itself is at risk.

Shrill alarmism might sell newspapers, but as well as reinforcing fear, it does a disservice to intellectual fidelity. Or to put it another way, what we have here is a classic case of Chicken Licken syndrome.