According to statistics by the British Department of Health, journalists were the top professional group who abuse alcohol, followed by workers, while teachers were the most moderate drinkers among British groups. In fact, British journalists drink around 44 units of alcohol per week on average, in comparison with an amount set at three to four units per day and that the Department of Health recommends. I do not quite understand the measurements behind these units, as I do not drink, although I have so far lived longer in London than I have lived in Beirut. In any case, I was not surprised by these statistics. I knew a big number of reporters in Beirut, many of whom were Americans and Britons; the latter were always more addicted to alcohol than their peers, especially that their traditional competitors in this field, i.e. the Irish and the Australian reporters, were not in numbers that were big enough to be included in the count. In Beirut, the St. George Hotel Bar was the preferred place for foreign journalists and spies to meet, followed by the bar in the nearby - and the relatively new hotel back in the mid-seventies - Phoenicia. It is a different story, however, with my snazzy colleagues who spent their money in any bar or nightclub between Martyrs Square (Al-Burj) and the sea in Ras Beirut, and I have two stories about that kind of atmosphere: An Australian colleague that I had worked with from the Reuters News Agency told me how he managed to charm one of the pretty women in a Beirut night club the night before. When he asked her about her job, she said that she was an “artiste”. He said that this was nice and asked her whether she was a painter? She replied saying “no, artiste”. Again, he asked her whether she was musician, but she replied “no, artiste”. He kept asking her if she was a performer, or a member in a troupe, and again and again she replied with the same thing. The Australian colleague then said to me: I did not know that in your language, an artiste meant a prostitute. The second story happened during a reception at the St. George Hotel: The correspondent for the Londoner Daily Express - which was still published in a folio format but now is a tabloid newspaper – got annoyed with the performance of the piano player, so he decided to spill all of his drink inside the royal! At that moment, I felt that the piano player was going to explode with anger especially that the colour of his face turned to dark red and his nose was rubbing against the assailing correspondent's nose. The latter, however, was almost in a coma unawares of what he had just done or of what had angered the musician so much. Meanwhile, there were many fellow Arab colleagues who, like me, did not drink, but I was a bit more superior, or perhaps a bit more inferior, because I also have never smoked in my life and did not drink black bitter coffee either. I preferred coffee with milk and sugar, and drank it perhaps once or twice a day and not more, while other colleagues barely finished a cup of black coffee (with no sugar), before they started drinking the next one. If of anything, this is evidence of my shortcomings as a journalist, with the other evidence being today's column itself, as all of the above was an introduction. This means that I have built a room whose walls are wider than its interior. In fact, I was originally gathering some data about the continued deterioration of the printed press in the West, when I found the information about the British journalists' abuse of alcohol. I found that to be quite logical, or justified, with the decline in sales and in advertisements, and the layoff of journalists the newspapers employ, even when some of whom possessed a great deal of experience and potential. Moreover, the British journalists claim that they drink spirits so they can forget their woes, but I have known many foreign journalists since the days of Beirut, and I do not believe that they needed any excuses to drink. They did not even try to humour us and respect the fact that we were not drinking to refrain from consuming alcohol in front of us. Actually, should the printed press flourish again tomorrow, I believe that the British journalists would drink more alcohol to celebrate this improvement. But in any case, I do not think that the printed press will return to being prosperous. The latest figures I have collected for the month of May, for instance, show that the sales of all daily newspapers published in London, as well as the Sunday papers, fell again, and at rates ranging between one percent and sixteen percent (with the exception of the Sunday Time, the distribution of which having risen by a half percent. But perhaps the numbers related to last month, which will be issued a few days from now, will show a decline in distribution, as in previous months). Furthermore, I read the latest figures concerning the daily “Times” newspaper and the Sunday Times which show that they have lost 51 million pounds. Meanwhile, their publisher Mr. Rupert Murdoch has almost completely surrendered to technology, and said in an interview with Fox television - which he owns – that the demand for the electronic media will continue to rise, but that he expected readers to pay for electronic newspapers in the future. Anyway, I will leave the divination of the future to fortune-tellers, and will content myself with what I know for a fact: With the situation being as such, President Barack Obama invited a blogger to a press conference at the White House for the first time in the history of these conferences. This irked the printed press reporters of course, who complained and protested against this move. However, the message was clear: the electronic press is not that soon to come; it has already arrived.
