Dressed in black with dramatic red lipstick and an equally dramatic necklace that looked more like a work of art strung around her neck, Raghida Dergham spoke to a group of students, professors and other interested community members about her experiences as a journalist, one who started as a young woman in a male-dominated profession and has developed into one of the leading journalists writing about international issues for the Arabic press and analyzing the Arab world for an American audience. She is a columnist and senior diplomatic correspondent for the pan-Arab daily Al Hayat and is a political analyst and contributor to nearly all the top broadcast and cable news-shows and top newspapers (see her bio here) and as interviewed many world leaders and several scoops, from the secret Oslo talks to the appointment of Bellemare as the new UN in Lebanon to landing the only interview with accused-terrorist Ramzi Youssef.

She spoke about her personal journey through the media, often focusing on the challenges she faced as a woman in the profession but also highlighting the success she has had over a career that has spanned more than three decades. In Beirut female columnists are not “huge in numbers” and even in the U.S. it is a realm of journalism reserved for men, she said.

She was first published when she was 15 years old. She told the story of how she had to be accompanied by an aunt or even a younger brother everywhere because that was the cultural requirement for doing such work. At 17 she moved to upstate New York with her uncle and “learned what it was to be independent,” not least of al by putting herself through school. She noted that this period of time ws the beginning of bridge building between two cultures – “I have become an interpreter of these cultures.”

In 1974 at age 20 she hosted a radio show in Boston where she learned everything from scratch. “I found confidence was an amazing asset,” she said, and the dividends paid off years later when she was threatened with being called before a military court in Lebanon for her writing and ostensibly her participation in a panel in Washington that included an Israeli official. But more on that later. Making documentaries at that time was very political and divisive she recalled

In 1976 she moved tot h New York City to cover the United Nations. At 23 she became a foreign correspondent in a position that traditionally had been reserved for “old ugly women.” She found that it was hard to be taken seriously and it was a huge hurdle that required her to do her research and work hard to prove herself and keep up with the men and older women: “I worked twice as much as any man or any young person.”

1979 proved to be an important threshold – she interviewed several world leaders, appeared on television in the U.S. for the first time to talk about Khomenei’s revolution. Her first appearance was on the McLeherer show on PBS and the other guest was an Arab leaders who she described as looking down on her with contempt - “You could hear the discrimination in his voice.” She didn’t just interview Arab and Middle Eastern leaders because she wanted to cover the world. Among her interview coups was one with then-president Ferdinand Marcos. She described the setting in which the interview took place, which was designed to intimidate her and reinforce his superiority over her. He sat on a throne-like chair that was a level above the chair she sat in so that he could look down at her and she was sitting there looking up at him. But she was not intimidated, and when 10 minutes into the interview he told her her time was up she said no it’s not, I’m not finished, and startled him into agreeing to keep going. After that she says he latched onto her and wanted to convince her of his political program. (Yet another instance of her confidence helping her achieve her journalistic objectives).

When she covered the meeting of Non-Aligned Countries held in Cuba she decided not to adhere to the traditional ways of interviewing, which she describe as rather obsequious though not in so many words, drawing on “my American experience, my Anglo Saxon training.” They were shocked, these leaders who were used to soft-ball questions and people began to warn her “this is too brave of you.” “I would not relent,” she said. “To be a journalist you need to not tow the line. I’m supposed to represent the people who don’t have a voice to ask questions” of those people, she is supposed to be fore the audience, the reader, “that’s my duty.”

In the 1980s, she continued, there were “just a handful of us women journalists” but there was a lot of nastiness. “For some reason a man was congratulated and a woman smeared if they would succeed in this profession.” She said these smear campaigns and intimidation worked in many cases, and women left journalism.

“Women were being set up to pay a big price in the Middle East because of the religious revolution” she said, because they paid the price of war and of men’s adventure, specifically mentioning the Iran-Iraq war and Palestine.

But she resisted the notion of compartmentalizing women and gender because she didn’t want ot set them off or write through a gender lens. But she does sit on the Board of Directors for the International Women’s Media Foundation. “I opted to put my gender in neutral” because she wanted to focus on what she delivered not her personal life.

In 1989 she was pregnant as she made her way to Belgrade for a conference of the non-aligned countries on her debut assignment for Al Hayat. (Al Hayat was started by Kamil Mroue in 1946 and published until the 1976 outbreak of civil war, but was re-launched by his son Jamil in 1988 and has now merged with LBC). She conducted ten interviews with world leaders, and said about that year “it was just a blessing, the doors opened up for me.”

By then world leaders knew who she was, and she told the story of running into Mubarak who seemed to recognize her but wasn’t sure where and ran away when he found out who she was. Nonetheless, she did an interview with him and he was talking about Israeli public opinion this and that when she asked him what about Arab public opinion. “Arab public opinion eh?!” he scoffed. Her interview with Saddam Hussein's Vice President, Taha Yassine Ramadan, broke several taboos and held him to account in ways that would have been impossible in Iraq or even other Arabic countries. “I would not relent because I had to get the story,” she explained, but said she would have been arrested in Iraq and noted that the security guards who were standing around her, probably to intimidate her, their knees were shaking. “The location where a journalist does his or her work” matters because she was doing in Belgrade what she “couldn’t in Beirut or Cairo.”

Bringing her story to the present day she said that she opposed the Iraq war and wrote articles in the lead up to the war that warned against it because she knew from her beat that there were no weapons and others knew too but didn’t want to believe. She said she has been targeted by neoconservatives who have tried to prevent her from being on American television and was assaulted in the streets of NY because of her views on the Palestinian issue. But intimidation also comes from her own home country of Lebanon

Dergham told the story of when her passport was revoked, which according to the stories that get told in reports on freedom of the press in Lebanon by press freedom organizations, for example, was because of her participation in Washington on a panel that included an Israeli official. She sought to set the record straight. She said the reason given for the annulation of her passport by the Lebanese government was that she spoke at the Washington Institute and debated, publicly, with Daniel Pipes and Uri Lubrani, an Israeli official, but said she was defending Lebanon. The “real reason” the passport was annulled is that the man dictating what he wanted to be said about the UN process in Lebanon (I believe she was referring to Maj Gen Jamil Sayyed) did not like what she was writing, which was based on what she saw and heard at the UN and didn’t apparently jive with what he was saying. “He decided to punish me and intimidate others. It was the perfect moment for intimidation.”

International professional organizations (like the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) whose letter of protest to President Lahoud was reprinted on Gen. Aoun’s website) protested and stood by her and she succeeded in canceling the annulment. But she found out by accident that they had taken the case to the military court – where defendants are not allowed lawyers, she said – and she fought to have the charges dropped. She was successful. “Never has this happened” she explained about the dropping of charges. She said she is very proud of this accomplishment because it represented a “huge attempt to intimidate” her and other journalists. “That General is now in jail,” she noted.

She receives threats and “I cannot go to Lebanon if I want to get back alive” she said. She explained that she was not talking about the state of Lebanon but those who are against the state, the militias. “Unfortunately they succeeded in silencing some colleagues of mine” (several journalists critical of Syria have been killed over the past two years since the Hariri assassination).

Michael Hudson, a professor at Georgetown, opened the Q & A session by asking how the influence of the journalistic profession has grown or diminished over time in the Arab region, and asked whether the press in the Arab word plays the role that the US press does in terms of being a 4th pillar.

She responded by saying that the Arab public is very politicized. “Politics is a way of life.” Most of the public is angry at the US and feel what is happening to them and their countries is because of outsiders.

Al Jazeera, she said, was a catalyst. It was new, it broke taboos, “but it has divorced itself from its pioneering role to break taboos and speak in the voice of the public, to educate not agitate.” But now it is agitating, even if it became a place where responsible journalism was practiced.

LBC, however, “just wants to numb people with entertainment” and is not interested in politics. However, local LBC programming like Kalam al-Nass, a political talk show, is very important but features the same faces saying the same thing which gets boring, although Lebanese people doesn’t see this because Lebanese are obsessed with themselves and their country.

She noted that most personalities and beginners in the journalistic profession are Lebanese and Palestinian, with the Egyptians coming along, but that a “new breed in the Gulf” has been developing over the past decade. And bloggers in Egypt are very famous.

But she didn’t say much about blogs. She said that someone told her recently that she should read the blogs because they were attacking her and Daniel Bellemare, the new head of the U.N. mission investigating the Hariri assassination, for the story she broke about his appointment (I could not find any story she wrote about him last night as I was writing this article up though you can read Al Jazeera’s version here. I also searched the Lebanese blogs for this supposed controversy but couldn’t find a single mention of his appointment except on the online news sites like YaLibnan).

Dergham called this a “very confused time in journalism” and said we need to hang on to the “good old tools of journalism” because we are in a very tumultuous time. “Journalism is way too important to leave in the hands of non-professionals,” she warned.

Adel Iskander, visiting professor and author of the first book about Al Jazeera, followed up with the next question about what is Arab journalism and what does that mean. (His work on Arab media focuses on notions of identity and alterity, really cool stuff).

Her answer? “I am identified as an Arab journalist” but doesn’t know if she identifies herself as such. “I think of myself as a journalist based at the UN. I cover international affairs not bilateral relations. I take pride in the fact that I am a UN-based multilateral journalist.” She’s able to get interviews because she doesn’t cover the UN in the traditional way. Many presidents now were junior diplomats what sat at her home on her floor and ate with her.

Dergham said that covering the UN and being a UN-journalist is not “segragationist” like in Washington where a tiered system means that Arab journalists are “second-tier or lower” as are other foreign journalists. “At the UN I was equal to all other journalists,” she said.

She then pondered what she had to offer that blogs don’t, what makes her journalism important in the blog era. In the days of websites and blogs she said she is one of the very few people who offer English people what she write in Arabic because it is translated into English (rather than writing an entirely different article for that audience as some newspapers and journalists do). We multiply the access to what we’re saying; we can say what we’re say in our own language in multiple languages – a rather new phenomenon. She gave the example of how her approach differs from an Arab TV journalist colleague who she said addresses both audiences in a way that satisfies them, the Arab audience and the English audience. She, however, said she was the opposite of him because she confronts Arabs to think about the American point of vie and the American public to self-criticize. “Every time I write a column and I make people think and think differently I’m satisfied,” she proclaimed. “It really would have been a hell of a lot easier to get the applause,” she added ruefully with a sardonic smile.

Her identity, getting back to the question at hand, is Arab-American, she said, and she writes in English and Arabic. She lives in NY, which appears to be good thing given the tactics of intimidation she talked about earlier. Her 17 year old daughter is fearful of her profession and Dergham said she realizes that she made a huge investment and the choices she made put her on a this path. “I can’t do anything else, its’ too late,” she said several times.

It was my turn next to ask her a question that would contribute to my research on the Arab media and politics – specifically what the role of professionalism and activism is in her profession and whether these two seemingly incompatible approaches can be reconciled. Her answer was really interesting and revealing.

“I happen to do both,” she said, because she is a reporter and a columnist. “If I have a page one story I apply the traditional tools of journalism, like interviews. I am strict and still compete like I’m 20 years old.” Every time you write a story “precision is in the balance” and the “future is in the balance.” But when she does a column it is different. “Every time you sign your name life is in the balance because any opinion,” she said, can have consequences. “What distances me from activist is I have a background as a journalist.”

“I use the column to provide a service,” she explained. “Activists use my profession and journalism for an agenda” whereas she is expressing a point of view not being activist. She castigated television saying that much of it was unprofessional these days because the guests just come on to attack and “muddy the waters” (in reference to political “debate” shows that clutter cable television, I imagine). “Activists have tried to invade the profession” and have a “field day” with blogging, she said. As long as they identify as playing an activist role, she said, it’s ok. “Luckily we don’t see this is newspapers.”

Another audience member followed up with a question about how different journalist deal with the Iraq war and its coverage, which she responded to by saying that she is “critical of my American colleagues” because they just took it for granted, especially in the run up to the war. She said she’d argued with the major players an with journalists like Judith Miller about what they were writing. She said there was also misleading Arab media. One piece of the puzzle that let the war happen was banking on Arab public silence. “This is not the first failure of the US media, it’s the second at least,” she said, the first being the Iran Contra affair which was broken by a small paper in Lebanon, Ash Shira’a.

A student toward the back of the room asked her what, given the dangerous nature of the profession, keeps her going. She laughed and said she sometimes thinks of writing novel or something. But it’s “my sense of responsibility. I feel I oow it. I enjoy the freedom, I can say what I want though I can pay for what I want.” And she admitted, “it’s an aphrodisiac to see you name in the paper, to be invited to speak at Davos” and other important events where you rub-elbows with world leaders and heads of state. “It feels good – there is that selfish part of it.” And, she refrained, ‘it’s too late” to do anything else… “unless I decide to write a book about love.”

The next question was what is meant by professional journalism and when it is conceived of as a watchdog in the Middle East considering that some of the conditions are not present, e.g. the tradition of government keeping media on a short leash. “Pan Arab media are more independent and daring than localized media,” she explained, because of laws and their ability to function. “Just think if I did not have professional organization behind me” and if Edward Said had not written about her case – a new younger journalist would be in jail. “Laws are so important” because people get scared when they’re living there (in those societies with restrictive laws and punishments for freedom of expression). She said what’s happening in Egypt is troublesome and that the government decides how much to control the media. In Lebanon there is a more divided media, those that are pro and against the state. The times call on people to be on one side or another wither with the state or with the militias – you can’t combine both – which has manifested itself in the media.

So how do you arrive at a professional media? She asked rhetorically. Just one way – “go back to basics” and separate out reporting, editorial, analysis, so that they are separate. The roots are in the laws, and freelancing all the time is not going to improve professional journalism. One thing that she would tell all journalists: “Our job is to hold their feet to the fire” they being the politicians, “and I hope more journalists will do the same.”

Mounir asked he to what extent Al Jazeera Arabic and English are preserving the Arab identity and whether it varied between them, but she said she doesn’t watch them regularly and can’t really answer his questions. However, she noted, they are owned by the same people. She noted that the American embrace came late. “It was a pioneer in breaking taboos but by the time the American embrace came there were others.” She said that there were two things, however, that bother her – most programs are about incitement and screaming. She said that when she goes on a show they’ll agree with the producers beforehand on the guidelines but then it turns into a shouting match. “The whole point it to make, stand accused,” she said, and noted that she thought that there were Islamists in Al Jazeera and noted a shift in that direction. She condemned the Qatari government and said “Qataris are abusing the media for their own purpose and the public is back to square one” because it “dumbs down already dumb populations.”