Working at the End of the Assembly Line: A Conversation with Joris Luyendijk about the Impossibility of Doing Western-style Journalism in Arab Countries

In 2006, Joris Luyendijk wrote a best-selling book about his experiences as a correspondent in the Middle East. The book People like Us. Images from the Middle-East offers an insightful, critical, and self-reflexive view on the problems concerning the practice of journalism in Arab countries (and other regimes, for that matter). The author argues that practicing Western-style journalism in nondemocratic systems is a contradiction in terms. Luyendijk fervently pleads for a more self-reflexive and transparent kind of journalism