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 The UAE’s National Media Council has blocked UK paper The Sunday Times from being distributed in the country, following the papers’ publication of extremely critical comments regarding Dubai’s debt situation – and with a rather unfortunate image.
According to staff at The Times, speaking to the WSJ/Zawya Dow Jones
(also owned by Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp), the NMC didn’t give a reason for the ban.
But anyone who’s seen the image – depicting Dubai ruler His Highness Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum drowning in a sea of debt (still on show on The Times’s website) – shouldn’t be surprised by the move.
An anonymous official at the NMC told AFP: “The Sunday Times was not distributed today. We cannot accept a personal insult. It is against our traditions.”
He also added that there was “no ban on the newspaper”, suggesting that the block only applied to yesterday’s Sunday Times, and that The Times and other publications which had been critical of Dubai’s debt situation (most of them, at last count) were still on sale.
We’ll attempt to test this hypothesis shortly in the real world when we look for a copy of today’s Times, which is printed locally for the UAE.
While this is in some ways a clear example of censorship, it’s not like everyone didn’t know the rules. “Insulting the rulers” has always been high on the list of things not likely to impress the UAE authorities – and that image was always going to be insulting.
In case anyone doesn’t know, Dubai gave the financial world a nasty shock on Wednesday evening, just before the Eid Al Adha holiday, when it announced it was intending not to pay back a sizable bond ($3.5 billion or $4.05 billion, depending on the source) on its due date next month.
Stay tuned for a closer look at the media’s role in the Dubai Debt Mess.
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