world | Mohamed Fahmy
Exit
Caught Between Egypt, Qatar and the Struggle for Free Press
Judgment comes in just a matter of days –
July 30 – in the trial of us Al Jazeera journalists, after 19 months of a tormenting experience
that has changed me and the lives of my loved ones forever.
Understandably, the world is preoccupied with news about nuclear deals, thugs who kill their own people under the perverted justification of jihad and the banner of Islam and the war on terror that has left many journalists – myself included – under constant threat by governments who consider us just collateral damage.
Among the 200 journalists globally who are now in detention just for doing their job, perhaps our case is one of the best examples of how journalism and politics overlap in the media landscape today. It's no secret that the government of Qatar, the owner of the Al Jazeera Media Network, is a die-hard supporter of the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood.
Was I overly ambitious as a journalist always out for a new challenge to take on the job of the Al Jazeera Bureau Chief of the English channel months after the ouster of the Brotherhood in 2013? After all, the Egyptian government banned and considered the Arabic arms of the channel as biased to the Islamic group and a clear supporter of its cause.
For that very reason I became hypercritical of my own work like never before. I went over in my mind every single bit of newsgathering, statistic, live broadcast and story that came out of our Cairo office. In all humbleness and after much reflection, I consider our reports -- which the Egyptian government alleges were biased and fabricated in favor of the Muslim Brotherhood -- to have been flawless.
And many months later, that assessment was validated by a technical committee of experts appointed by the judge in the retrial, who testified so to the court after reviewing the so-called video evidence.
world | Mohamed Fahmy
Exit
Caught Between Egypt, Qatar and the Struggle for Free Press
Judgment comes in just a matter of days –
July 30 – in the trial of us Al Jazeera journalists, after 19 months of a tormenting experience
that has changed me and the lives of my loved ones forever.
Understandably, the world is preoccupied with news about nuclear deals, thugs who kill their own people under the perverted justification of jihad and the banner of Islam and the war on terror that has left many journalists – myself included – under constant threat by governments who consider us just collateral damage.
Among the 200 journalists globally who are now in detention just for doing their job, perhaps our case is one of the best examples of how journalism and politics overlap in the media landscape today. It's no secret that the government of Qatar, the owner of the Al Jazeera Media Network, is a die-hard supporter of the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood.
Was I overly ambitious as a journalist always out for a new challenge to take on the job of the Al Jazeera Bureau Chief of the English channel months after the ouster of the Brotherhood in 2013? After all, the Egyptian government banned and considered the Arabic arms of the channel as biased to the Islamic group and a clear supporter of its cause.
For that very reason I became hypercritical of my own work like never before. I went over in my mind every single bit of newsgathering, statistic, live broadcast and story that came out of our Cairo office. In all humbleness and after much reflection, I consider our reports -- which the Egyptian government alleges were biased and fabricated in favor of the Muslim Brotherhood -- to have been flawless.
And many months later, that assessment was validated by a technical committee of experts appointed by the judge in the retrial, who testified so to the court after reviewing the so-called video evidence.
world | Mohamed Fahmy
Exit
Caught Between Egypt, Qatar and the Struggle for Free Press
Judgment comes in just a matter of days –
July 30 – in the trial of us Al Jazeera journalists, after 19 months of a tormenting experience
that has changed me and the lives of my loved ones forever.
Understandably, the world is preoccupied with news about nuclear deals, thugs who kill their own people under the perverted justification of jihad and the banner of Islam and the war on terror that has left many journalists – myself included – under constant threat by governments who consider us just collateral damage.
Among the 200 journalists globally who are now in detention just for doing their job, perhaps our case is one of the best examples of how journalism and politics overlap in the media landscape today. It's no secret that the government of Qatar, the owner of the Al Jazeera Media Network, is a die-hard supporter of the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood.
Was I overly ambitious as a journalist always out for a new challenge to take on the job of the Al Jazeera Bureau Chief of the English channel months after the ouster of the Brotherhood in 2013? After all, the Egyptian government banned and considered the Arabic arms of the channel as biased to the Islamic group and a clear supporter of its cause.
For that very reason I became hypercritical of my own work like never before. I went over in my mind every single bit of newsgathering, statistic, live broadcast and story that came out of our Cairo office. In all humbleness and after much reflection, I consider our reports -- which the Egyptian government alleges were biased and fabricated in favor of the Muslim Brotherhood -- to have been flawless.
And many months later, that assessment was validated by a technical committee of experts appointed by the judge in the retrial, who testified so to the court after reviewing the so-called video evidence.
Exit
entertainment | lauren duca
The Death Of The Cheerleader
The slutty, ditzy mean girl of an archetype is fading from pop culture.
The word "cheerleader" is so laden with potential cultural meaning, it feels more like a theoretical concept than a noun usually meaning "person who leads cheers."
As a sport, cheerleading has been steadily gaining respect since the turn of the 21st century. As an archetype, it has shriveled into a token of hypersexuality and the nastiest teen girl stereotypes, a sort of shorthand for the terms "mean girl," "slut" and "dumb blonde," all stuffed into the same midriff-bearing uniform.
The way she has transformed in pop culture -- as an expression of popularity, desirability and ditziness -- is perhaps one of the most extreme ways fictional representation has hijacked our perception of women. The cheerleader we see across film and TV is not just the typical fun-house mirror reflection churned out by Hollywood. By the late '90s, the cheerleader had morphed so drastically she became more of a symbol than a real person. That is, until the release of "Bring It On."
The film, which celebrates its 15th anniversary on Aug. 22, marks a pivotal shift for the figure. We were introduced to the Rancho Carne Toros at the peak of the cheerleader's rise in teen films, and their myth busting of the cheerleader cliche marked a clear decline in her presence on screen. It's as if "Bring It On" opened and shut the door on smart takes on the archetype. Now, a decade and a half later, the cheerleader of pop culture is seemingly on the verge of extinction.
The reigning prototype for the cheerleader by the year 2000 was a sort of Frankenstein's monster, cobbled together from dismissals of youth and femininity into a portrait of the beautiful American girl at her ugliest -- an idea which "Bring It On" immediately sets out to dismember.
"I'm sexy, I'm cute, I'm popular to boot," sings Lindsay Sloane as Big Red in the punched-up opening scene. "I'm bitchin', great hair, the boys all love to stare. Don't hate us 'cause we're beautiful, 'cause we don't like you either. We're cheerleaders."
"Cheerleaders were so stigmatized as inherently ditzy and superficial figures that everyone from executives to potential actors assumed a movie about them would be just that."
The song provides a satirical definition for the societal understanding of cheerleaders at the time, while the Busby Berkeley-style choreography that accompanies it functions as a pitch-perfect introduction to the tone of the movie that follows. If director Peyton Reed had opted for a more typical '90s teen movie opening -- maybe a tracking shot over an outdoor Cali high school, scanning over huddled cliques with a stoner zipping by on a skateboard -- "Bring It On" would be totally different.
"There was talk of cutting the opening number, and I just threw myself on the sword," writer Jessica Bendinger told The Huffington Post. "I was like, 'If you cut this cheer, then it’s just a dumb movie! Who cares?' You need to let everybody know your tongue is in your cheek. There needs to be self-awareness." Self-awareness, that is, as a cue to the audience that it was OK they were about to watch a movie about cheerleaders.
Nearly everyone who worked on the film joined on with their very own cheerleader prejudice in need of unpacking.
Getting studios interested in "Bring It On" was a struggle for Bendinger. She spent months pitching the script, then called "Cheer Fever." Driving around Los Angeles in her unairconditioned Saab, she got more than 27 rejections before the eventual green light from Beacon Communications. Even after that, it was difficult to get a director and cast to sign on.
Beacon agreed to produce the film with a distribution deal through Universal (who had initially passed on Bendinger's pitch). Fifteen years later, it's clear they never could have known it would yield a small franchise now including a musical. Cheerleaders were so stigmatized as inherently ditzy and superficial figures that everyone from executives to potential actors assumed a movie about them would be just that.
"I always wanted to direct a high school movie, but I never thought it would be a cheerleading movie," admitted Reed. He read the script with all of pop culture's pre-fab notions attached to the figure.
"Before, cheerleaders were mostly fall characters in movies," he explained. "They were usually meant to represent the status quo or the snobby kids. There’s also a large degree of cheerleader movies that exploit the sexuality of cheerleading. This was kind of different."
Once Reed was on board, his vision helped bring on Kirsten Dunst, who turned down the lead role of Torrance after an initial reading of the script, and Jesse Bradford, who eventually joined on to play her edgy rocker of a romantic interest, Cliff.
The goal was to re-contextualize cheerleaders, so they weren’t the people you hated. - Peyton Reed
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Bradford also approached the film doubting whether the cheerleader could be taken seriously.
"As a 20-year-old kid or man or man-child, whatever you wanna call me back then, I had my reservations about being in a cheerleader movie," Bradford said. "But I sat with Peyton and he showed me he wasn't a guy who wouldn’t be directing a cheerleading movie for the sake of directing a cheerleading movie. This movie was going to be more than that."
There's almost a desperation in the voices of the cast and crew, a need, even with the hindsight of their success, to let you know they were in on the joke from the start. The creatives behind "Bring It On" didn't just have to convince audiences to watch a cheerleading movie, they had to convince themselves to make it.
By 2000, treating "cheerleader" as a loaded term seemed as natural and automatic to teen movies as the propensity for high school to be an emotional hellscape. It almost seems odd to question the origin of the figure. But while the cheerleader of the '90s felt as structurally necessary to the adolescent experience as puberty, her shift into the incarnation "Bring It On" encountered is a relatively recent addition to human existence. Let's skip back about 100 years for a brief history of the sport as a whole.
From Top: franckreporter via Getty Images; BEACON COMMUNICATIONS