What if journalists make history? The question is sheer form but it justifies itself by a series of editorials activity which offers a first-hand material: Stories and columns which could be published in books: The following preview is certainly incomplete but significant.
It’s back in 2001 that Abdelhjalil Lahjoumri published “cry Aisha, your misled columns”, a kind of posthumous tribute paid to Aisha Mekki who has given her nobility letters to the judicial column on the pages of “L’Opinion” daily. The columns which she has moderated “At the fringes of society”, “Society and Justice” were a kind of unavoidable meetings read by prominent readers such as Abdallah Laroui and Michel Jobert, the kid of Oued Roman. All those readers were reading the beatings of Morocco, with neither blooming nor knowledgeable contorsions, a raw image of the society standing up to daily hardships.
Aisha Mekki covered actually the chronicles of courts, but her descriptions have gone beyond courtrooms and tragedies which have been played.. the principle of anteriority makes incursions and displacements at the heart of popular neighborhoods, urban areas and various places gave substance to her columns.
Aisha Mekki’s columns were not treaties of sociology as they were not psychological profiles in the strict sense of the term. They could have constituted a raw material hard to contest or to question because nobody could challenge daily life in its various and ultimate manifestations.
Many publications over the last twenty years are rationally part of testimonies and raw materials which could be used by historians as well as by sociologists and economists. Mohamed Jibril’s publication “unrest in society” brings together a selection of stories on the period 1970-2020 and subtitled “60 years of Moroccan society news”.
There is an essential question being raised over the last decades, today and for upcoming years: How to make society? Lamalif magazine has raised that documentary richness.
Zakia Daoud has testified in “Lamalif years, 1958-1988, thirty years of journalism in Morocco” a kind of treaty of journalism resistance” as wrote Salah Eddine Lemaizi in “journalism in bled/in the upcountry”.
Based on this professional experience, Zakia Daoud has established a link between journalism practice and reality, this Morocco in its economic and political environment but first of all human: I have done an exciting job which I have practiced and loved. I have known remarkable people who were part of my life.
Reda Dalil, in his publication “This Morocco which we refuse to see” has tried to tap into interior fragilities to bring out his own truth which often crosses with a great number of the Internet generation.
Reda Dalil has put together those columns published by written press and also on his own blog ‘mondistainblogspot.com’, which is a kind of hybrid electronic daily column.
In “Lamalif biased culture”, Zakia Daoud has traced the cultural course of that publication which has largely marked that of cultural Morocco over the 30 years of Lamalif longevity; in this context, Khalid Lyamlahi had written “topics written in 1978 are still echoing in the present”.
“Morocco of Hassan II” of Stephen Ormsby Hughes, bureau chief of Reuters agency presents himself as columnist of events of which he was witness, has retraced Morocco’s evolution at the political, economic and social levels from 1952 until the crowning of His Majesty King Mohammed VI in 1999”.
Mustapha Alaoui has contributed to this edifice nourished by his large professional experience made up of observations and reflections. In his publication “The reporter and the three kings”, as in “Morocco of Hassan II” by Stephen Hughes, Mustapha Alaoui set up a memory book; and also did Seddik Maaninou in his testimonies series, has traced, in four volumes, his personal experience as a TV journalist and as an executive of the Ministry of Information.