When Americans leave office, Arabs leave the profession

In much of the Arab world, it is no surprise when a journalist abandons the profession the moment he becomes a spokesperson for a president, a minister´-or-a senior adviser. The departure is not a career shift-;- it is a shedding of the very essence of journalism. What disappears first is the core that was meant to protect him: the right to question, to doubt, to scrutinise and to keep a healthy distance from power. Overnight, he becomes a voice that justifies every government action, attacks former colleagues and reproduces the state’s narrative as if he were part of its security apparatus. We all know the examples, writers who once spoke boldly, only to turn their boldness against everything they previously defended the moment they entered official service.
Rather than revisit familiar Arab cases, consider a very different one: Karoline Leavitt, Donald Trump’s White House press secretary, who stepped down this week, not because of a presidential outburst, not because of a public reprimand and not because of the humiliations that often accompanied working for Trump. She left simply because she wanted to care for her children. That alone is a paradox worth pausing over. Yet, as Arwa Mahdi wrote in The Guardian, she also “left behind a legacy of lies.”
Serving as Trump’s press secretary is no easy assignment. The phrase “message discipline” loses all meaning in an administration where no one, not even the president, knows what he will say next. Trump reverses positions abruptly, contradicts his senior officials and contradicts himself. And still, Leavitt managed the most difficult task of all: pleasing an audience of one.
Trump has spent decades mastering the art of media manipulation. He demonises journalists, flatters them and toys with them. He understands the media’s hunger for constant novelty and uses it as a tool of distraction. In this environment, Leavitt’s role resembled that of an Arab leader’s press secretary: rejecting questions, attacking motives and defending the president even when he insulted reporters in crude terms. Trump admired her “quick lips,” though he hardly needed a spokesperson-;- he is the loudest president in modern American history, delivering his message -dir-ectly through a daily storm of posts, interviews and quarrels.
Yet Leavitt ultimately remained what her title said she was: an employee who could leave her post and return to her private life without becoming part of the machinery of power. She did not become a minister, was not handed a political portfolio, was not rewarded with a senior government position and was not asked to rewrite the president’s story. She simply walked away.
A Syrian colleague of mine, accredited at the White House and familiar with Leavitt behind the cameras, told me the stage rarely reflects the backstage. Despite her sharpness in public confrontations, Leavitt was more approachable and flexible in private, available to reporters, able to separate her political role from her respect for the profession she faced every day. This paradox reveals a deeper truth: the problem is not always the individual, but the position itself when it shifts from a media -function- to a political one.
The Arab counterpart, however, does not merely leave his newsroom-;- he enters the heart of power. He becomes a minister, an adviser, an official spokesperson, a cog in the machinery of governance. He leaves journalism to become part of the official narrative, dismantling what remains of his independence and turning the press into an administrative annex of the president’s office.
Journalism is not a job, it is a professional honour. It is the ability to say what the president does not want to hear, to stand in the space that protects truth from authority and to preserve the right to doubt even when the cost is high. A journalist who becomes part of the state loses that honour, no matter how glamorous his new title may be. But a journalist who leaves his post without leaving his profession keeps that honour intact, even if he errs, even if he defends his leader, even if he becomes part of a political machine.
A government spokesperson, anywhere in the world, cannot be expected to oppose the president. That is understood. What is neither understood nor acceptable is when he becomes a conduit for falsehoods, a device for justification, a machine that turns mistakes into achievements, facts into conspiracies and truth into “an attack on the state.”
No one asks a spokesperson to be an activist. But he is asked to be honest, to say what he knows is true, to reject what he knows is false and to retain a minimum respect for himself and for the profession he once belonged to. That minimum collapses for many in the Arab world, where the spokesperson becomes part of the state’s disinformation apparatus rather than an employee explaining policy.
Defending power is a political -function-. Defending truth is a journalistic one. Even in a chaotic administration like Trump’s, the White House spokesperson knows that the job is not to write history but to explain a political stance. He knows the press will question him, criticise him, mock him and that he will leave his position one day without altering his relationship to the truth.
The Arab spokesperson, by contrast, is asked to help manufacture official history, rewrite events and present the government’s narrative as the only truth the public must believe.
That is the essential difference: The American journalist leaves his post without leaving the truth. The Arab journalist leaves the truth in order to keep his post.

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