This is my last Dubai Goodbye.

A spice seller in the back streets of Deira in Dubai. Just one of the hundreds of people I've photographed in the city.

I really couldn’t be bothered trying to dissect the hilariously faux-melodramatic (yes, I just made that term up) and appallingly inaccurate story on Dubai that has been getting plenty of attention in the blogosphere. Besides, who wants to read a 10,000-word post? However I’m disappointed in The Independent for publishing this latest piece of drivel without a sub-editor getting a fact-checker (I assume that The Independent still has them) to verify some points. You know, to get some good old-fashioned facts right. Blinkered opinion coupled with a colonialist mentality, thinly veiled racism and bias are one thing, facts are another – but I’ll leave it to others to scrutinize this and do the work of The Independent’s sub-editors. One day, someone will write a factually accurate, balanced and nuanced article on the cultural, political, economic and ecological complexities of Dubai as the great globalisation experiment gone wrong, but this isn’t it. It was a wasted opportunity to take a serious look at the dynamics of a globalized workforce.

I’ll be very interest to see whether The Independent adds some corrections at the end of the article. However I won’t be writing about it here, this is the last post I’ll do about the reporting on Dubai, it’s just out of control now. You really know that the coverage has reached a point of ridiculousness when the British Foreign Office has had to distance itself from the ‘over exaggerated’ stories being generated in the British ‘press’ about Dubai. I think this sums it up pretty well that the reporting is so over-the-top that it has become a diplomatic issue.

This kind of ‘reporting’ with its frequent factual errors reminds me of the travel stories that used to come out about Dubai when it was the new darling destination – when writers would basically plagiarize the words we wrote for Lonely Planet on Dubai and the work of the Time Out Dubai crew to manufacture a story out of a three-day junket. Then they’d add hilarious inaccuracies that had us and the Time Out crew laughing hysterically when these stories came out. There was the well-known (and highly overrated) visiting Australian chef who claimed that there was no Turkish Delight in Dubai so it wasn’t really part of the ‘Middle East’. There was the writer from a well-respected newspaper who claimed that no women worked on the immigration counters at the airport – therefore women were repressed. Then there was the writer who claimed there were no public beaches in Dubai and that their hotel room overlooked an ‘oil rig’. Then we have the generic ‘Dubai is a country’, ‘Dubai has no oil’, ‘Dubai is oil rich’, ‘Dubai only makes money from real estate’, ‘Dubai was a desert 30 years ago’, ‘women can’t drive’, ‘you go to jail for just being gay’, ‘Dubai ate my homework’. All false, of course, and all funny, but now the reporting is of a far more serious nature with far more serious consequences.

I’ve photographed hundreds of people – expats and locals – and spoken to many hundreds more about where they’re from and how they ended up in Dubai. Many stories are heartbreaking, many uplifting.

I’m just a photographer and writer who has lived in the UAE for ten years. I’ve worked in both the public (government) and private sector in the UAE. I’ve photographed hundreds of people – expats and locals – and spoken to hundreds more about where they’re from and how they ended up in Dubai. Many stories are heartbreaking, many uplifting. While I have an opinion – formed by actually interacting with about a few thousand more people than a journalist with an agenda to write a hatchet job – it’s not my role to defend Dubai. While I’ve tried to put on record some corrections about much of the bullshit written about the place – once again it’s not my role to defend Dubai. There are, for the record, plenty of things I dislike about Dubai and it is far from being my favourite city in the world, but both Abu Dhabi and Dubai have a place in my heart because of the people I’ve met and worked with there, both locals and expats. I’ve been lucky to have had insights into the myriad lifestyles being played out in Abu Dhabi and Dubai and to simply put these people into three convenient categories – ‘the exploited’, ‘the exploiter’ and the ‘gold-digging soulless Western expat’ – is disingenuous, reductionist, and unhelpful to any constructive public discourse on the future of this incredible (in the true sense of the word, I might add for those who feel I’m a Dubai apologist) Arab experiment. I guess having the roles of the ‘slaves’, the ‘evil overlords’, the ‘heartless mercenaries’ and someone playing the role of the ‘hard-hitting investigative journalist’ as the narrator, frames it in terms that make for a better read than actually sending a real investigative journalist to Dubai. Nuance is the adversary of modern mass media reporting, it’s far easier to just define roles such as the protagonist and antagonist and let it play like a B-grade melodrama. It’s just a shame to see this printed in a newspaper that I admire.

I guess having the roles of the ‘slaves’, the ‘evil overlords’, the ‘heartless mercenaries’ and someone playing the role of the ‘hard-hitting investigative journalist’ as the narrator, frames it in terms that make for a better read than actually sending a real investigative journalist to Dubai.

Something that I’m finding fascinating in the blogosphere is the current method of dismissing those who try to correct of the falsehoods presented in these articles attacking Dubai. It’s easy, just label these people as being ‘in denial’ about how evil Dubai is. If you dare correct a wrong ‘fact’ presented by a Western reporter, it’s assumed you don’t care about the ‘slaves’ in Dubai. If you think a journalist has written an unbalanced piece on Dubai, you clearly can’t simultaneously care about how much water is wasted on a golf course in Dubai. Well, I’m capable of this and have enough brain power left over to realise that these ad-hominem attacks are a form of self-defense from people who generally hide behind pseudonyms and probably couldn’t pin Dubai on a map anyway.

But I’ll bow out on writing about the reporting on Dubai with one final thought.

Western democracy is a wonderful thing when it is true democracy. But when the Fourth Estate – one of the pillars of democracy – is not doing its job, it makes Western democracy look like Western hypocrisy.

You know, just like when the media failed to perform its role before that little war that seemed like such an excellent way to bring Western-style democracy to the Middle East.

* A small note. I’ve removed some of the profanities presented in an earlier version of this post because, on reflection, they lessen the strength of the argument presented here.

And yes, comments are off because I’m done with this subject.