I probably should tell you something about the newspapers here

Disemboweled babies, OK; faces, no

Most of the front-page pictures in Algerian newspapers are of buildings and people’s backs.

You see President Bouteflika’s face a lot and some other prominent politicians. Foreigners’ faces are OK too, but never ordinary people’s. Many pictures are kind of blurry and taken off the Internet and overwhelmingly they are static and devoid of humans. If you must run a photo that contains a face, it is more hidden than the faces of women on the streets here -- with a black band across the eyes or fuzzed-out pixilation over the area of the end. Women are rarely mentioned at all, much less pictured, although one paper yesterday had a story about women wearing the hajib and these veiled and masked women were OK to depict.

And yet, photos of unspeakable gore seem to be fine. Even I, a big advocate of the media showing the realities of war, balk at shots of bombed-apart babies held up for camera lenses in Lebanon that one newspaper here ran recently.

There is nothing in the communications law that forbids showing faces, nothing in the Koran either. It’s a matter of life and death. During civil war in the 1990s between the Islamists and moderates, terrorists picked their victims from photos in the newspapers. That doesn’t happen today, but one can see how the average citizen might regard their name or photo in the newspapers as a little more serious than an invasion of privacy. Profiles or bios are as rare as portraits in the newspapers.

The most striking thing about the newspapers here is the number of them. Dozens, some in French and some in Arabic, are sold daily in racks around the city. There are no broadsheets – all are tabloid – and none has a huge circulation. The illiteracy rate here – low in North Africa – is still 30 percent and the median age of this population of 33.3 million is just 25.5. Young people and illiterates don’t buy newspapers even when they sell for 10 Algerian Dinars, about 7 cents.

The number of newspapers doesn’t mean there is variety. Nearly all run the same ads as well as the same stories – heavy on politics, Middle Eastern affairs, and security concerns. The government is responsible for there being so many newspapers. It requires all papers – unless they buy their own presses – to use government owed printing presses. This is a cozy deal because the government is not insistent that hefty printing bills be paid – unless you happen to run an article that the government doesn’t approve of. The government buys newsprint – although papers unwilling to pay a little incentive are likely to get paper wet with humidity from bad storage and its ink doesn’t stick right. The government also supplies advertising for newspapers it likes, thus negating the need to operate an expensive advertising department or bother local merchants for their business. The government also plays landlord to the media – giving publishers cut-rate rent in one of two Maison L’Presse – kind of walled-up newspaper encampments. One is a former military barracks. But with free ads, mostly free printing and cheap rent you can make a pretty nice profit at newspapering.
This all tends to discourage new management consultants in Algeria out to demonstrate the virtues and strengths of free press systems. But Don, our boss, has a good philosophy about this.

Yes, compared to the UK or US, the press here is repressed. We can write, just for an example, that our president is stupid or morally weak and we will not go to jail and Algerian journalists do not have that assurance. But they are not using the freedom they do have. In comparison to Tunisia, for example, where the government allows no freedom of expression, the press here has many freedoms.

Journalists can, but mostly don’t, exploit a solid group of people in government who do want to open up the system to scrutiny, he says. They can, but usually don’t write deeply about issues that the government does not care about, but that people do like consumer problems or education. Journalists can, but usually don’t, dissect and explain government policy so that the quality of public debate would improve.

Instead, too often, the newspapers simply parrot government press releases or write wandering opinion pieces. Del has speculated that this is not laziness so much as caution. If you get three sources or more to describe and pin down a scandal or instance of government abuse you are pretty much flying right into the face of authority. But if you just obliquely give your personal opinion of something…well, who can take offense?