Michael Delahaye is the author of After the Fall: The battle to save independent media in the post-Soviet world, published by Wakefield Press earlier this year. Here, the former BBC reporter/producer reflects on his work as a consultant-trainer with the Al Jazeera TV news channel in the Gulf state of Qatar.

The invitation to work with Al Jazeera came in 2004, following my six years as a ‘media missionary’ criss-crossing the former Soviet Union. The AJ brief was to train its new generation of foreign correspondents. At the time, the channel was not the respected global news broadcaster it is today. Just a year after the Iraq War, it was typically characterised as ‘Bin Laden’s mouthpiece’ on account of it having obtained and transmitted to-camera statements by the mastermind behind 9/11.

It didn’t take long to realise that working with Al Jazeera would be different. Those I was training, from across the Arab world, would not just be reporting on constant conflict but were already living it in their own countries with their own families.

I make it a rule when conducting classroom sessions that all mobiles be turned off. During an early AJ course, I noticed that one of the participants – an Iraqi journalist formerly based in Al Jazeera’s Baghdad bureau – was surreptitiously checking his mobile. Twice I asked him to turn it off. When I noticed him re-checking a third time, I told him to leave. Only then did I learn that Al Jazeera had brought him to Qatar not for training but for his own safety. While reporting in Iraq, he had fallen foul of one of the militant insurgency groups and had become a target. The text messages he had been scanning were from his mother, telling him that his two brothers had been kidnapped and would be released only if he returned to Baghdad. From then on, I took a more relaxed attitude to mobiles.

It wasn’t always so clear-cut. A key element of TV news training focusses on interviewing techniques. For instance, how rigorously and persistently should the journalist ‘hold authority to account’ when a member of the government or any other senior politician fails to give a straight answer to a tough but relevant question? (Think the ABC’s David Speers on Insiders or Sarah Ferguson on 7:30.) To illustrate, I would play broadcast interviews, usually of BBC journalists grilling Tony Blair over alleged weapons of mass destruction. On one occasion, a fellow consultant protested that showing such material was inappropriate because those we were training had no possibility of doing such probing, occasionally combative, interviews in a region where not a single Arab state was a fully functioning democracy. Worse, he argued, any journalist who tried would likely suffer repercussions, ranging from the sack to imprisonment for criminal defamation. My justification was, and remains, that journalist training should be aspirational and that means showing examples of ‘best practice’, whether it can be implemented at the time or not.

I think I’m right. But I must admit to the occasional wobble at three o’clock in the morning. As in so much else, working in the conflict cauldron of the Middle East challenges one’s Western perspective of the world.

But never underestimate the fellowship of journalists. In the 2010s, I led a couple of workshops in the Bosnian capital Sarajevo for AJ’s off-shoot, Al Jazeera Balkans. The channel covered the former Yugoslavia which, though technically post-conflict, was still volatile. I can remember sitting in the AJB newsroom and, looking around, marveling how Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks (Orthodox Christian, Roman Catholic and Muslim), who only two decades earlier would have been killing each other, were now pooling their talents to produce arguably the best news service in the region. 

So, you’re thinking, AJB is a rare beacon of hope. Sadly no longer. It closed in July last year, after the Al Jazeera mothership in Qatar decided it could no longer support its Balkan satellite. Dashed dreams are not unique to the Middle East.

After the Fall is available to purchase here.

Blurb:

It is 1998. After twenty-five years as a BBC TV reporter and producer, Michael Delahaye is sent to Russia as part of a UK/US programme to develop independent journalism in the former Soviet Union. With Boris Yeltsin in power, hopes are high of Russia, along with the other one-time Soviet republics, becoming functioning democracies.

Over the next five years, Delahaye and his fellow media missionaries will criss-cross the vast Russian Federation, south through Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan … and into Moldova, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.

Their brief is to bring enlightenment to countries where the very concept of journalism has been unknown for seven decades; to support – sometimes help create from scratch – television stations that will be independent, impartial and promote human rights.

What they find is the rouble in freefall, state assets being sold off, black BMWs cruising the streets and an ex-KGB officer tipped for promotion in Yeltsin’s administration … Vladimir Putin.

After the Fall, a foot-soldier’s story, charts Delahaye’s realisation of the challenges, both cultural and political, of transition; how, as in Iraq and Afghanistan, the West has repeatedly over-estimated its power to recast other nations in its own image.

Praise for After the Fall

‘Follow the author as he travels from Georgia into Moldova and Uzbekistan, to introduce something they haven’t seen for seven decades: a free press. Of course it all went badly wrong but what an adventure.’ – Caroline Overington, the Australian

‘Delahaye’s record of the time is not just a very engaging boots-on-the-ground documentation of trying to establish an independent media in Russia, but also a snapshot of the Wild East in transition that rings true … An intriguing portrait of a collapsed empire and the West’s reaction.’– Cameron Woodhead and Steven Carroll, Sydney Morning Herald

‘While Delahaye’s memoir is fascinating, his clear-eyed assessment gives a great background to how Putin’s regime has so corrupted Russia.’ – Robyn Douglass, the Advertiser

‘A fascinating read.’ – Suzanne Hill, Nightlife, ABC Radio

‘… utterly delicious and engaging, taking us along to meet fabulous characters, and to observe a world few of us will get to see … After the Fall is a delight from cover-to-cover: informative, engaging, witty, and thought-provoking.’– Tracey Korsten, Glam Adelaide

‘… a most readable account … interesting and informative, an object lesson in taking cultural differences for granted.’ – Clare Brook, Queensland Reviewers Collective