✍️ Jobs and News Update ✍️ — November 21
50% discount, Qatar World Cup controversies and most bizzare headlines plus hundreds of new jobs added to the board
Hello folks, happy Monday! I’ve just arrived back from a beautiful weekend in Barcelona, full of sunshine, tapas and the finest Iberian Jamón. A rule I have for myself is that I only eat red meat on vacation, so it’s always that extra bit juicy and tasty when I do have it.
I’m running on about four hours of sleep, so apologies for being later than usual today. Let’s get to some housekeeping and then we’ll be stepping outside the newsroom into today’s topic: the festive yet most historic and controversial FIFA World Cup in its 92-year history. Below we’ll get into why this year’s tournament has caused such division, and look at just some of the biggest and most bizarre headlines heading into the competition.
If you missed Friday’s newsletter, we added a bunch more conferences, events and fellowship deadlines, including Diving For Documents and Data by the Washington Press Club Foundation, and the JournalismAI Festival hosted online by the London School of Economics. And some of the newsrooms with job deadlines coming up include at the AP, Bellingcat, Greenpeace, Politico and Scientific American.
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Okay, to Qatar we go…
The Controversy of the 2022 FIFA World Cup
Qatar was chosen as the host of the 2022 World Cup all the way back in 2010 and FIFA’s decision shocked the football world. Not only did the Gulf state beat out Australia, Japan, South Korea and the U.S., nations who already had far more developed infrastructure when it came to football stadiums and an ability to accommodate millions of fans for the month, but the traditional summer tournament (for the northern hemisphere) would’ve have meant games were due to be played in temperatures of up to 50°C/122°F.
Immediately accusations of corruption and bribery were behind Qatar’s winning bid. FIFA’s scandalous history is too long for one newsletter, so I’ll leave you with timelines from ESPN and The Guardian to explain why so many observers remain skeptical Qatar won the bid fairly.
Domestically, Qatar’s controversies kept on coming with The Guardian reporting last year that 6,500 migrant workers had died in Qatar since it was awarded the tournament. Qatar’s population was a little under two million people in 2010, so it relied heavily on workers from nearby India, Nepal and other south Asian countries.
In response, the Qatari government countered that there were 37 deaths among laborers at World Cup stadium construction sites, of which only three were “work-related”. But the International Labour Organisation noted that those figures were inaccurate because Qatar doesn't count heart attacks and respiratory failure as work-related, despite these being common symptoms of heatstroke from carrying out labour in exceptionally high temperatures.
Fasting forward slightly and last week a Danish TV’s live broadcast was interrupted by Qatari authorities who told the crew they couldn’t film. Danish journalist Rasmus Tantholdt could be heard asking the three men that approached him “You can break the camera, you want to break it? You are threatening us by smashing the camera?” The incident reignites questions for tournament organizers over denied claims of strict limits on where media can film.
And just one day before the opening game of the tournament, it was announced that alcohol sales inside the stadiums would be banned to coincide Qatar’s strict laws against consuming alcohol in public. Certainly lower down the totem poll of morality than the country’s malevolent human rights for sure, but still yet another incident adding to the uncertainty and chaos surrounding the tournament.
Talking of leaving it to the eleventh hour, videos have surfaced of some fan villages, where tens of thousands of fans will be paying £175 per night to stay, still looking like the building site that attendees of the failed Fyre Festival turned up to. Except unlike Billy McFarland, Qatari officials had 12 years to carry out the supposed meticulous plan that was enough to have the tournament awarded to them in the first place.
Video: Inside Qatar’s fan village
Lastly and perhaps most bizarrely, FIFA president Gianni Infantino used a press conference to deliver a 45-minute soliloquy on the hypocrisy of the West against Qatar and it’s human rights record, instead of taking questions from journalists on the many issues. To defend Qatar’s record, he opened his monologue with “Today I have strong feelings. Today I feel Qatari, I feel Arab, I feel African, I feel gay, I feel disabled, I feel a migrant worker."
Video: Fifa boss accuses West of “hypocrisy” in World Cup speech
The irony is that Infantino does have a point: The UK for example has expanded its economic and diplomatic relations with Qatar in the past couple of decades. And in the U.S., the state you live in dictates whether or not you can have a legal abortion. It just doesn’t hold much weight coming from the president of FIFA, a perennially corrupt organization whose reputation seemingly cannot get any lower.
That’s all for today. Apologies once again for the delay. See you on Friday for an on-time deadlines edition. 👋
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