Help us be your voice

Yesterday I was honoured to be appointed by DT as its deputy Editor-in-Chief and I realized that the mission ahead is bigger than anyone can imagine. With the increase in the number of newspapers in Bahrain since the democratization process initiated by His Majesty the King in 2001, the responsibilities of the newspapers in contributing towards the success of democratizing our country has become even more significant.

Now before I move to the objective of this week’s column. Let me thank my family, friends and colleagues for how they welcomed this news yesterday and for all the support and kind words they shared with me.

It was an overwhelming experience receiving all the messages of congratulations but family, friends and colleagues are always people you expect to get support from. I therefore want to extend special thanks and gratitude to complete strangers who sent me messages wishing me the best of luck, strangers I have never even met once in my life.

They are the ones that made me feel that the people of Bahrain are genuine and supportive towards the empowerment of women and my appointment by DT came on the same day my country was celebrating Bahraini Woman’s day, an annual event held under the patronage of Her Royal Highness Princess Sabeeka bint Ebrahim Al Khalifa, yesterday celebrating woman in engineering.

So thanks to all who supported me all these years and thanks to those I look forward to accomplishing many missions with, my new colleagues at DT.

Now if we go to the world of print press, we will see that all the experiences have been successful but what remains to be lacked is how each newspaper should have an identity of its own, something that distinguishes it from the other.

And I say this because as a reader I observe all our newspapers and always look for content that I find in one and not the other.

What distinguishes one paper from the other of course is content in addition to the messages disseminated by columnists that write for these papers and I hold a lot of respect for all our colleagues and they have however taken utmost advantage of the freedom of expression applying of course self-censorship that I genuinely believe in.

Many people believe that the freedom of expression means you can say anything but that should never be the case and imposing our ideologies on each other should never be the case. As much as I could be right about something and the other might be wrong, the opposite is equally possible and in transitional phases where people live through a time when major changes occur around us, we should be capable of accepting that we could be wrong and our ideas and judgements could be wrong to.

In 2006 I left print media and moved to television broadcasting but because I believed in the power of the print press I managed to stay in it through writing columns for different Arabic and English newspapers

It was a place where I could express myself and on the same page read how other columnists views were about a particular issues and how they perceived it. And what was interesting that age and experience were not necessarily factors to be right or wrong when analyzing an issue and that is why we should always listen to different sides and the views of different age categories.

And because of that, I would like to hear from our readers, what they want to read about, those interested in writing columns, young people who have talents, and to consider DT the place that represents people from different ideologies and backgrounds because that’s what will distinguish us. With your help, we will continue to be your voice so help us be.