Published: August 30, 2008 10:16 pm         

MARK BENNETT: Former Valley resident helping Qatar in quest for a free press

TERRE HAUTE — It’s my memory’s favorite image of Richard Roth.

White, button-down shirt. Loosened tie. He’s sitting, with his elbow resting on the copy desk just outside his office as Tribune-Star editor in the late 1980s. He’s holding a phone several inches from his ear. The irate poohbah on the other end of the line is venting over Richard’s editorial criticizing that very city official. Knowing the nearby copy editors can overhear, Richard peers over his wire-rimmed glasses at us and grins. Then, with a brain surgeon’s calm and a voice as deep as Johnny Cash, Richard practically repeats the editorial’s passages to the agitated politician.

Nearly two decades later, his unflappable character is proving valuable in a far different setting.

Richard Roth is the ideal choice to teach free-press, American-style journalism in, of all places, the Middle East. He began that seemingly improbable mission earlier this month, when classes started in the Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism at Qatar. The emir of that tiny, oil-rich country in the Persian Gulf and his wife sought out Northwestern to open a branch campus in its capital, Doha.

That quest by the emir, Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, and his wife, Sheika Mozah, seems radical in a region of the world where the terms “press” and “freedom” seldom go together. But upon seizing power from his father in 1995, the emir’s first acts were abolishing Qatar’s Ministry of Information and making censorship illegal. He sponsored the independent, often controversial al-Jazeera network. Societal reforms emerged, too, with women gaining the rights to vote and drive, and the establishment of elections on parliamentary and municipal levels, though the emir’s family retains its ultimate power.

In 1998, Sheik Hamad and Sheika Mozah created an Education City on a once deserted 2,500-acre plot in Doha. They wanted to import the premier programs from the best American universities into a central site, and Qatar would pay for it all. One by one, they came — Virginia Commonwealth University’s design school, Cornell’s Weill Medical College, Texas A&M’s petroleum engineering program, Carnegie-Mellon’s business and computer science programs, and Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service. Two years ago, Sheika Mozah visited the United States, inquiring about the top journalism schools, before deciding to invite Medill, Roth explained.

Northwestern insisted it would teach the same curriculum and philosophy as is taught on its Evanston, Ill., campus. Sheika Mozah agreed, professing a commitment to “promoting the right to independent and freely reported news and information,” Roth said.

That premise, revolutionary in that locale, remained unchanged on Aug. 17, when the first 17 students at Northwestern’s Qatar campus began classes. Roth, their professor, has served as associate dean and then senior associate dean at Medill in Evanston since 1998. Except for a stint with the Wall Street Journal’s online edition in New York, he’s been teaching journalism, first at DePauw University and then Northwestern, since leaving the Tribune-Star 19 years ago. This experience already holds a unique place in his career resume.

“Here, the highest possible calling is to be a professor,” he said by telephone from the Persian Gulf-side apartment he and his wife, Trish, share.

Fifteen of his 17 students are female. The government will pay the full tab for Qataris to attend college anywhere in the world, but the country’s culture restricts girls from traveling alone. That societal barrier led Sheika Mozah to build Education City, bringing American schools to those women. Only four of the 17 students are actually Qatar nationals, though. The others are sons or daughters of the country’s growing foreign population, representing the United States, India, Bangladesh, Canada, Belize, Brazil, Jordan, Pakistan and the Sudan.

“They’re very respectful,” Roth said of Medill’s inaugural Qatari class members. “They love being students.”

He lectures to them in English. The textbooks and classroom concepts mirror those used at Medill in Illinois.

Doha is awash in newspapers, with seven — three are English, four Arabic. Like his students, those newspapers are “finding their way” in getting acclimated to freely reported news.

“The press here isn’t really free like it is in the United States,” Roth said. “You can’t say things here about the emir that people would say about George Bush in the U.S.” But with reforms and re-investment in the nation’s economy and education occurring rapidly, residents see the emir and his wife as “good to the people of this country,” he added.

The ruling couple hopes Northwestern’s presence will elevate the quality of journalism at Qatar’s own newspapers. As for the university, it agreed to a 10-year deal, that afterward would be re-negotiated, Roth said.

“Our goal is to have an impact on society in this part of the world through free expression and journalism,” he said.

Historically, the transition from strict government control of news and information to a free press eventually tests the will of reformist rulers, especially when their own actions get questioned. It happened in the former Soviet Union, and Roth realizes such moments might crop up in Qatar, too. What then?

“I don’t know,” he said. “One of the things that has to happen is that I — as leader of this Qatar school of journalism — have to push the envelope of what we’re able to say, and what we’re able to take pictures of.”

Even in America, a newspaper’s role as a watchdog of governments’ service, spending and police activities seldom wins public adulation. “If you go to the United States, there are a lot of people who think the press should be censored,” Roth said, “or that there should be certain things you shouldn’t be able to write about.”

Thus, the potential backlash from a journalist delving into records at a local government office in a Middle Eastern country is unpredictable.

“Poking around into that, I don’t know how they’ll react,” Richard said, “but over time, year by year, sooner or later this part of the world will be democratized.”

Roth sees Qatar aiming in that direction. Sheika Mozah “sees this as the Switzerland of the Middle East,” he said. Its people enjoy an average annual income of $75,900, according to Time magazine, thanks to its vast oil and natural gas reserves. Only 250,000 of the 1.4 million residents are Qatari. The majority of its residents are foreigners, lured by jobs, either in fossil-fuel industries, investments or construction. The latter goes on 24 hours a day, intensifying after sundown, when the temperature drops from its typical highs around 110 degrees. Huge desalinization plants keep fresh water abundant in an arid climate.

The emir told Time the goal is to educate the population, and to modernize the infrastructure and economy, to prepare for the day when the oil and gas run out.

The progressive outlook fascinates Roth. Anti-American sentiment isn’t seen in this Islamic country, he said. Qatar is slightly smaller than Connecticut, with a border touched only by Saudi Arabia on the south and the Persian Gulf elsewhere. Its residents overwhelmingly share Americans’ disdain for terrorist groups, Roth explained. Crime is rare. Gasoline costs 70 cents a gallon.

“The only American they hate is George Bush,” he said. “It’s not what you think.

“I feel totally at home here,” added Roth, now “a young 61.”

Some freedoms in Qatar exceed those in the United States. (Buying a cold beer isn’t one of them; liquor purchases are restricted.) Television has no equivalent of the Federal Communications Commission, and the freewheeling airwaves reflect that.

And, “everybody here seems to smoke cigarettes,” Roth said. “It’s like nobody here has ever written, ‘Hey, this is not good for you, boys and girls.’ So there’s journalism to be done about those kind of issues, too.”

The Tribune-Star published stories about secondhand smoke hazards as Vigo County debated a local ordinance three years ago. Some officials and residents criticized the newspaper’s reporting. In a free press, angry letters and phone calls come with the territory.



Mark Bennett can be reached at mark.bennett@tribstar.com or (812) 231-4377.