The most vitriolic piece on Dubai so far

Today's UK paper The Independent has a story jumping on the new Dubai-bashing bandwagon and it's the most vitriolic I've seen so far.

At least the writer appears to have spent some time here, unlike many of the previous commentators, but it's obvious that the objective was simply to find the worst possible angle and seek out the worst possible examples.

It's biased, has no balance, has plenty of inaccuracies. It raises some valid points about things that need attention - treatment of labourers, bankruptcy laws, enforcement of the laws and the like. But to get those points across he crosses the line of responsible journalism.

It's so full of highly doubtful and downright untrue claims that it detracts from the the important issues he talks about.

He's painting a word picture to create an impression of the city that supports how he wants to project it. Lots of little comments, the implicit suggestion that the people he includes are the norm, emotive words thrown in, quotes from people which in themselves are unimportant and, worse, are simply untrue, but they're included because they add to the word picture. It's all to create the pre-determined bad impression.

There was no need, he could have stayed with the facts and discussed the things that need changing in responsible way. The vitriol is undisguised.

Here's what I mean by the word picture he's painting.

The first two sentences start to give the game away - the claim that Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid's "...image is displayed on every other building, sandwiched between the more familiar corporate rictuses of Ronald McDonald and Colonel Sanders.

On every other building? The truth is that the image is not even on one in a thousand buildings.

And I wonder whether he's noticed how many portraits of the Queen there are around London.

He reports on a group of Brits in the Double Decker bar - but if he did indeed come across this behaviour he's obviously been at pains to scrape the bottom of the barrel.

"As I enter, a girl in a short skirt collapses out of the door onto her back. A guy wearing a pirate hat helps her to her feet, dropping his beer bottle with a paralytic laugh.

I start to talk to two sun-dried women in their sixties who have been getting gently sozzled since midday.

...an Essex boy shouts at me in response, as he tries to put a pair of comedy antlers on his head while pouring some beer into the mouth of his friend, who is lying on his back on the floor, gurning.

Questionable. I seriously doubt whether the bouncers would have allowed that behaviour.

Nevertheless there are badly-behaved expats in town - the yob culture exported. But Hari doesn't bother to point out that the excesses of a few are outweighed by hundreds of thousands of extremely hard working expats, from Britain as well as the rest of the world. Hundreds of thousands who are working hard and saving, putting their children through school, supporting extended families, who know how to behave.

In a mall he 'approached a blonde 17-year-old Dutch girl wandering around in hotpants' to get her opinion - but he was at pains not to approach any of the hundreds of families with kids in pushchairs or carrying their weekly groceries to ask for their opinions. Balance is not a word that comes to mind about in his interviewing.

There's the highly dubious story about 'Karen Andrews' who has supposedly been living for months in her Range Rover in the car park of an international hotel.

That leads to Mr Hari's ridiculous claim that "All over the city, there are maxed-out expats sleeping secretly in the sand-dunes or the airport or in their cars."

Absolutely untrue. People living in the departure lounge of the international airport? That's the only part of the terminals they can get in to. Think about it, do you think Security would allow that? And sleeping in the sand dunes in the city. Sand dunes in the city? The only people sleeping in the sand dunes in the desert are people on weekend camping trips.

He reports on the construction scene:

"The World is empty. It has been abandoned, its continents unfinished.

All over Dubai, crazy projects that were Under Construction are now Under Collapse. They were building an air-conditioned beach here, with cooling pipes running below the sand, so the super-rich didn't singe their toes on their way from towel to sea."

In reality The World hasn't been abandoned, projects are not 'under collapse' and the chilled beach was not a Dubai creation but was the private Versace hotel floating an outrageous idea to gauge reaction. It won't happen.

There's no mention of the hundreds of projects, both residential and commercial, which are finished, occupied and successful.

Even the section on the terrible conditions at some of the labour camps is highly selective. There are thousands of labourers, and others at the bottom of the social ladder, who do not live in these conditions and are happy with their lot. Money sent home to keep an extended family, to educate children and more than a few are considered wealthy in their home countries.

He brings up the water question.

"Dubai drinks the sea. The Emirates' water is stripped of salt in vast desalination plants around the Gulf – making it the most expensive water on earth. It costs more than petrol to produce, and belches vast amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as it goes."

Over 120 countries have desalination plants, there are over 13,000 operating around the world, yet it's presented as though Dubai is unique in desalinating water.

He's been at pains to search out disgruntled expats and quote their comments, true of false.

One section is even headed 'Fake plastic trees', picking up on a quote from a disgruntled Filipina. Another untrue claim because the trees are real. Nor is the water fake, as she also complains. Fake water? What's fake water?

It's the language barrier, she doesn't mean fake but it's been included because it adds to the picture. Most trees are not growing naturally, but that's not 'fake' - they've been planted as street landscaping and in parks. Just like cities all over the world.

"...a Filipino girl tells me it is "terrifying" for her to wander the malls in Dubai because Filipino maids or nannies always sneak away from the family they are with and beg her for help. "They say – 'Please, I am being held prisoner, they don't let me call home, they make me work every waking hour seven days a week.'

"Always" is a strong word. No question that some families mistreat some maids, but the vast majority are not badly treated, are not prisoners. I know plenty of Filipinas and they're not harrassed by desperate countrywomen leading for help. In fact it's normal for them to ask whether we can give their friends and relatives back home a job in Dubai!

This maids theme is another he gives a false impression about. "...one theme unites every expat I speak to: their joy at having staff to do the work that would clog their lives up Back Home. Everyone, it seems, has a maid"

Again it's simply not true. Again he was very selective in the people he chose to interview.

"Between the malls, there is nothing but the connecting tissue of asphalt." More that's untrue. The malls are kilometres apart and in between them there's the usual cityscape - apartments, villas, commercial premises, office blocks, factories, strip shopping. Dubai is a working, trading, bustling city of over a million people.

"The roads are all four lanes" he declares as part of the word picture. No they're not.

"The residents of Dubai flit from mall to mall by car or taxis"

He must have missed the city, where the footpaths are full of Dubai residents walking around. In summer of course people stay out of the heat and humidity as much as they can, just as in the UK they try to avoid the worst of the winter weather. But the city is for walking. New Dubai isn't, it wasn't built that way any more than Los Angeles was.

As I've said before, I have no problem with articles which are critical of Dubai, which point out issues which need addressing, but I do object to sloppy journalism and biased reporting.

The over-the-top fawning articles we had up to a few months ago extolling the virtues of the miracle of Dubai were just as bad. Again there was no balance and they set it up as a tall poppy which inevitably was going to be chopped down.

Dubai has appointed a PR company in London to handle the emirate's financial image. There's an urgent need to hire one to handle the wider Brand Dubai image to get some balance, some context and perspective into the picture. It's a pity it wasn't done much earlier because now it's rapidly becoming an exercise in damage control. Having worked in PR I can tell you that's the worst possible place to start.


Thanks to Grace over at Sandier Pastures for the heads up. You can read the article in full and see if you agree with me here.

Oh, and you can check out photos and reviews of Double Decker bar for yourself at Time Out Dubai, here. You won't recognise it as the same place described in Hari's article.

And if you want to see what Dubai really looks like rather than the completely and deliberately inaccurate picture conjoured up by Johann Hari, click on the appropriate labels here on this blog.