A Newspaper's End

Le Journal, one of the two of Morocco's more liberal magazines, closed shop this week.

The reasons for its closure were ultimately political:

A Moroccan court declared the magazine's publisher's bankrupt, and seized its assets on Wednesday. But the underlying reason for the magazine's end was political: It had been one of the few Moroccan publications that dared to touch some of the country's most taboo subjects, from criticizing the monarchy to the issue of the country's over the Western Sahara. The magazine's co-founder, Aboubakr Jamaï, contends that his finances were crippled by the Moroccan government's pressure on advertisers to boycott the publication. Jamaï's finances have been in disarray since a Moroccan court ruled against him in a defamation case in 2006, which ordered him to pay a punitive judgment of $354,000.

The other fairly liberal magazine, which I read weekly, wrote an interesting editorial about its closure. On the one hand, it decried the direction the country was going and expressed solidarity with Le Journal. On the other hand, it clearly marked some of its views as "extreme", thus distancing itself politically.

Most Moroccans I know prefer news that comes from the Persian Gulf, TV stations like Al-Arabiya and Al-Jazeera, because they know there is no Moroccan political influence over what is reported.