Freedom of the press “on time” at the World Cup

One of the best-known videos from the World Cup isn’t about a match. Present on every social platform and relaunched by every newscast, it’s almost impossible not to have seen the TV2’s Danish journalist, Rasmus Tantholdt, approached by security personnel during a live broadcast, being told to shut down the broadcast. Everything ended well, we don’t talk about it anymore and, to the joy of the organizers, the patina of normality that distinguishes all connections from Doha has returned. Even too much.

Normality itself is an abnormality, wrote Gilbert Keith Chesterton. The more observant will have already noticed that the background images coming from Qatar are tremendously similar and with the same angle. It is no coincidence, an indication is being applied – a euphemism – as simple as it is thorny. In the famous video that went viral, Tantholdt shows his press pass which authorizes him to film. Well yes, to film TV in Qatar you need a permit. While this may even be understandable, the presence of journalists in Doha is a story that goes back years, including investigations and online documents, which leaves many doubts about the “temporary” freedom granted by the Qatari government. The resolution of the European Parliament has arrived in the last few hours, but the inconsistencies have been known for some time.

Starting with the creation of the “Supreme committee for delivery & legacy”, set up by the Qatari government to plan and prepare for the World Cup. Press accreditations included. A committee ad hoc sounds bad, knows the ambassador of Qatar to the United States, Sheikh Meshal bin Hamad Al Thani, who continues to believe that the tournament will help change misconceptions about his country. In reality he seems to have achieved the opposite effect, that is to make everyone understand which ones are the right ones. Just the shots that look like a desktop computer are daughters of the rules on the official site where, under the heading “Filming permit request privacy” (eliminated in the English version but still carelessly consultable in the Arabic one…), three areas are indicated for he resumed. Three beautiful locations, for heaven’s sake, nothing to say about Doha’s Corniche, the lush West Bay or the futuristic Towers Area. The magnificence of the capital is well worth a live broadcast while everything else is not. Meanwhile, that indication remains there together with a long list, made known in unsuspecting times by Reporters sans frontières, which forbids showing anything that is not in the travel agency catalogues, from the private properties of residents to government buildings, from university to public offices. Interviews yes, but only in “protected” areas: you can go with the microphone in the garden of a McDonald’s, but not too far. “Qatar is not against press control”, Al Thani wrote in an article on Cnn opinion, but “too often their platforms have been used to present unilateral and factually inaccurate arguments”.

How did all this come about? The prodrome was present in another very bureaucratic document, signed by Fifa, made known before the competition: what would happen was not written there, but between the lines of the “Preliminary competition” pdf the hand of the Qataris.

We would not have expected the reinterpretation of Piero Chiambretti’s famous broadcast for Italia 90 when, with the team that gave life to the success of “Prove tecnica di transmission”, he had moved to the nearby United Arab Emirates for about ten days, mixing the images taken on loan from local TV with the pseudo-feminist meditations of Wanna Marchi on the condition of women in the Emirates. In short, if no one imagined seeing the paradoxical fashion shows in the desert, the camel races or Chiambretti dressed up as Lawrence of Arabia, it’s very little to have to settle for three backgrounds more suitable for the home computer than for the setting of a world championship .