At a recent symposium on pilgrimage and the media, Haj Minister Iyad Madani expressed surprise at the fact that the Kingdom, the cradle of Islam and location of its most sacred religious sites, continues to lack professional journalists whose specialty is Haj and Umrah.
The minister has indeed raised a very important matter whose significance is not confined to the profession. According to him, the Saudi media continues to handle the ever-expanding Haj and Umrah industry which involves millions of people at any given time with such a lack of focus and depth that the country evidently lacks journalists who have specialized in this area.
This unfortunately seems to be the case despite the fact that the Kingdom occupies a special religious place and despite the fact that the Saudi media is the only one in the world that should have produced professional journalists highly specialized in this field.
It is indeed a very strange situation. This is happening at a time when Haj and Umrah have become a full-fledged hospitality business and it is happening in an institutionalized industry governed by all the legal, administrative and financial rules applied by other major industries.
The ministry’s long experience with the media points to a severe deficiency in the reporting that accompanies Haj. The result is that many of the very important aspects relating to Haj and Umrah are either missed completely or receive very light and shallow coverage. Instead of expanding the coverage to include all sectors involved and all sectors that work in close coordination, the focus is always on certain areas at the expense of others that are no less important.
We hope that the minister’s words will serve as a reminder to our media to take the matter seriously and establish training programs aimed at producing a staff capable of providing professional coverage and articles about Haj and Umrah. It is only then that we can claim to have the kind of specialized media that gives us coverage free of exaggeration, sensationalism and shallowness, the main elements which unfortunately characterize the work of our ill-informed and unqualified journalists.
The Haj Ministry did the right thing by setting up an annual prize for the best journalistic work on Haj. The ministry does not intend to give the prize to whomever writes about it, hailing and praising its work. The objective is to encourage the kind of specialized work that treats Haj and Umrah as a rapidly expanding and integrated industry.
