Julius Caesar hears his door knocking on his door in the royal palace in Alexandria and allows Tariq to enter, and he turns around and a guard carries a lady wrapped in a rug that removes him from her to show Cleopatra, the queen deposed at the time from the throne of Egypt, who apologizes for surreptitiously entering the palace in this way because it was the only way she was guaranteed to meet Caesar who had just come from Rome. The dialogue between them jumped from political alliances to military and then to philosophy and literature. He was the nucleus of the great historical marriage between Alexandria in the southern Mediterranean and Rome in the northern Mediterranean BC in the series "Queen Cleopatra", directed by Tina Graffy and Victoria Adeola Thomas and produced in 2023.
A few days ago, the Egyptian authorities prevented the Dutch mission from continuing excavations in the Saqqara area (south of Giza) because the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden, the Netherlands, held an art exhibition that includes drawings of the ancient Egyptian civilization as well as drawings of black people.
The series began airing weeks ago in May 2023 on the Netflix platform, and was preceded by a wave of anger from Egyptians at the popular and official levels due to the embodiment of the British actress of African descent Adele James as Queen Cleopatra, and they considered that the matter is a promotion of African centricity or Afrocentric at the expense of historical facts in a work that is announced as a documentary based on the opinions of experts and specialists and not a work of fiction, in contrast to the opinion of the producer and narrator of the script of the series, Jaida Pinkett Smith, who believes that Cleopatra's skin is not It's historically settled, and there's no evidence that she was as blonde as actress Elizabeth Taylor previously portrayed her in a movie.
A few days ago, the Egyptian authorities prevented the Dutch mission from continuing excavations in the Saqqara area (south of Giza) because the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden, the Netherlands, held an art exhibition in which he presented drawings dating back to the ancient Egyptian civilization along with drawings of black people while hosting colorful stars such as the American star Beyoncé and dressing her up Pharaonic. Most media outlets have linked the official backlash to the Dutch to the message.
Beyond the debate about the role of the Afrocentric movement in rewriting history or even the skin color of Cleopatra as the last king of the Macedonian dynasty, which ruled Egypt after the death of Alexander the Great BC, this months-long global controversy and its repercussions clearly point to a crisis of production standards for digital platforms in an era that academics call the post-television era.
One of the features of this era is to bring the quality of the cinematic image to the small screen and the extreme fluidity in dealing with information and facts, in contrast to a previous literary commitment between any traditional television channel and its viewers to firmly separate what is fictional from what is realistic as a result of the historical treatment of television as a source of news and information in the first place.
Statue head depicting Cleopatra, the last pharaoh who ruled ancient Egypt, at an exhibition in Paris (Getty Images)
Post-TV Journalism Challenges
It can be clearly said that such a crisis did not arise in this way when dozens of documentaries were shown on local and international channels in Europe and the United States dealing with ancient Egyptian civilization or even historical issues, despite Western prejudices that often reared their heads in news programs and in cinema. The reason is simple, which is to ensure the credibility of the historical documentary work because it is the credibility of the channel on which it appears, which is not compromised.
I remember the late history professor Dr. Mohammed Farid al-Shayal told me that HBO had hired him as a consultant in one of its documentary series on the Crusades. The production team came from the United States to the British capital and had discussions with him about what an actor playing the role of Salah al-Din al-Ayyubi might look like, which is closest to what is mentioned in historical documents, from the possible color of his cloak, to the possibility of what the ring he wears and on which finger to be most precise.
This does not, of course, negate some ideological influence, especially the leftist, when dealing with a number of historical or economic issues in some documentaries, but it does not go beyond choosing the angle of treatment and does not go beyond it to distort or change the essence of events or the bodies of people in a way that violates the essence of the quest to add maximum credibility to the work.
This can be attributed to the virtue of television journalism, which has established a strict system within televisions since the spread of the era of this device, especially after the First World War, in almost all countries of the world. Because of them, the handling of any information material on the screen is subject to scrutiny and editing to ensure that it is not distorted on the one hand and not exploited for black propaganda or propaganda on the other. This is something that democratic and non-democratic countries vary in dealing with, and the areas of difference were confined to the political news aspect, and the documentary aspect remained often far from these biases and closer to expressing the principles of television journalism, which is a branch of the principles of journalistic work in general, which requires scrutiny, balance and objectivity.
According to these principles, broadcasting regulators received complaints from the public about any infringement, such as the British Broadcasting Regulatory Authority (OFCOM), which received, investigated and reported complaints. But digital platforms, including Netflix, are not subject to this body, so their documentary and information materials do not have any kind of censorship, which is to determine the focus of the crisis we are talking about. I imagine that these crises will be repeated until this important loophole is paid attention to in the new production process, which has advanced technologically tremendously, but has jumped on a number of journalistic standards that were not in vain but were developed because of similar problems decades ago.