One of the most beautiful trips that I have experienced, and I long to repeat them despite their fatigue and effort, are the press trips that come either suddenly or are according to a specific occasion or even scheduled a year in advance, but each of them has its own privacy and joy, especially if those trips are unofficial, and include A different journalistic delegation, including the experienced journalist, the novice journalist, and the troublesome journalist, among them the professional rivalry and the journalistic scoop, and among them the friendship of the profession and its troubles, where you find heated discussions, and everywhere, and you find cigarette smoke like a gray cloud that does not disappear, and the coffee does not stop being brewed, You also find pranks, laughter, and many benefits that travel with “friends” colleagues provides. Perhaps today’s trips are free of the hardship, fatigue, running, anxiousness, follow-up, and waiting that were imposed by the old traditional press, in the days of telex, fax, and Teleprinter, and calling from hotel exchanges, and staying up late inking “dasht” papers. », Today everyone “traces” his mobile phone, and sends and broadcasts audio and video from it, which has become the journalist’s weapon after the pen was the master of all things.
One of the funny things I remember during press trips is that I was once in one of the totalitarian “revolutionary” countries, with the slogan: one people, one party, one president, one examination, and I wanted to send press material by “fax,” so they told me that I had to go to a building. The central post office, which resembles the governor’s palace, may God bless him and may his glory perpetuate, where fear grips you and apprehension follows you in every corridor. So I approached a public employee who made me feel like a ticket collector on public transportation buses, and I said to him: I want to send this article to my newspaper. Be happy. He came out of his hiding place, holding a light brown file, and said: You must fill out this file, acknowledge everything in it, and sign it. Then we will send the material by “fax,” after reading it, and we will keep the original copy, and copies of it will be transferred to the different departments, each according to his specialty. ! I said to him: “Thank you, I do not want to send the material!” He frowned until he almost attacked: “Yes!” The matter has now passed from your hands to ours. You have no right to refuse or dispose of it until it is decided by the responsible authorities.” I said to him: “The issue concerns female artists, singers, marriage and divorce. It is not a political issue or of an intellectual nature or social criticism.” He responded. He interrupted the conversation: “We are the ones who decide, and we are the ones who evaluate!” I did not dare to leave that building with the Central Post Office written on its wall, which is the Central Suspicion Building.
The one whose profession was written in his passport as a journalist had to go to a specialized department in some progressive countries, said to be affiliated with a media body, to fill out certain forms and declare the type of photographic camera he was carrying. They may have recorded it on the last page of the passport, and in the countries of the Eastern and Western systems. The journalist is not allowed to come except after initially agreeing to visit him, and of course he will have a tourist companion and a translator, all of whom are graduates of military training, because they believe that what you cannot talk to the companion, you can relent in the evening and talk about with Translated, because they know a quarter of us and how they salt their feet at the end of the night, and how they insist on visiting cultural facilities at night… and tomorrow we will continue.
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