Building greater knowledge and enriching media reports across borders through collaboration between media professionals

In recent years, growing communication between the Arab world and the West has presented media globally with a tremendous challenge to producing balanced and fact-based stories following the highest professional standards. Often media in Europe create images full of stereotypes and prejudices when it comes to the coverage of the Arab region and Iran, which fuels misconnections about Arabs and Muslims. Similarly, media in the Arab/Iranian region also fall victim to producing generalising, stereotypical portrayals of the West, its peoples and ways of life.

This “stereotyping” may partly be explained by lack of knowledge, experience and insight into cultural differences, history, political circumstances, religious issues etc. on both sides. At the same time, the media development in recent years is witnessing a still stronger competition between rising numbers of media players providing more and more content through constantly growing numbers of media channels. This development seems to exacerbate a tendency among media professionals to resort to conveying stereotypical images rather than pursuing a greater understanding of the complexities.

By establishing partnerships between Danish, Arab and Iranian media, the twinning project is aiming at demonstrating, that it is possible to catalyse a process which mutually strengthens the professional practice in both the West and the Arab region, by establishing co-operation and exchanges of knowledge and working methods between media professionals.

The overall objectives of the twinning and exchange between Danish, Arab and Iranian media are twofold: To make coverage of the region in Danish media more multifaceted and less stereotypical while at the same time to nuance Arab and Iranian coverage of life in the West. The project also aims to encourage cross-fertilization between different groups of media professionals through exchange of inspiration and knowledge.

Twining between journalists follows a pattern, according to which each Arab or Iranian journalist from the selected media institution visits the Danish partner media in order to work on the production of articles/programmes within a jointly defined area of focus together with his or her Danish counterpart.

The outcome of the collaboration is to be published or broadcast in both the Danish media as well as the host media of the Arab/Iranian counterpart. Following the visit to Denmark, the Danish journalist visits his/her Arab or Iranian counterpart, during which time the collaboration is repeated, only on Arab/Iranian soil.

Through the twinning methodology, a levelled playing field is created in which both journalists enjoy the role as a “host” or local expert as well as the “visitor”. Furthermore, by benefiting from the knowledge, insight and network of their counterpart, both journalists build greater insight and understanding of the work methods of the country of their counterpart, local politics and cultural implications thereby enriching the final media output.