The article that started this makes Mr Roth look like a self-satisfied self-promoting individual with little connection with the realities. The Emir being on the front page of the papers every single day is an outright falsehood. It wasn't even true 20 years ago.

There is an elephant in this room that is being overlooked. It is the motivation of journalists.

The greatest jounalists have always been driven by a desire to improve society, making it better for the next generation. That pre-supposes that the next generation will be their own children and therefore any sacrifices the journalist makes will benefit his wider family.

In the Gulf, the English-language papers are staffed by foreigners who have no personal interest in the state of society here 20 or 30 years down the road. The only way a journalist can fulfil the urge to achieve a long term benefit for his family here is to keep the pay packet coming in, the state of society is of no genuine personal interest to him or her.

Academics who come here thinking that there is some deep journalistic ethic that is completely independent of the journalist's personal relations and circumstances are living in cloudcuckooland.

When we talk about self-censorship and protecting the ruling family as if it is something strange and alien to the principles of civilised journalism we would do well to rememeber that little more than 70 years ago the editors of the great English newspapers conspired to conceal the scandalous affair between the King and Mrs Simpson, until it could no longer be hidden. Very recently - and perhaps still today - The Times has been self-censoring criticism of China because its owner wanted satellite TV access there. I don't see the same outrage about the dismal standards adopted by the editor of The Times.

So don't imagine that Qatar is unique. Many newspapers spike stories that will upset their owners or push issues that promote their interests. Journalistic purity is a silly myth and worldwide journalists are generally assigned stories to write, they don't have freedom to churn out anything they like. Columists who do have that freedom have been pre-selected for having opinions that their editor or proprietor finds acceptable.

I'm surprised magazines have to submit their articles to the censor. In the newspapers, the censor was removed in 1995 and has not been back since (or at least, hadn't up to two years ago).

It is a myth that the Arabic language papers are full of great stories the English papers can't touch. They are full of complete rubbish, such as a four-page spread of religious opinions on whether it is acceptable to have a secret wife, quoting various fatwas from scholars, almost all of whom had been dead for years. They are full of social chit-chat and drearily over-written opinions, padded out by press releases that are usually published as issued (at least the English papers cut them back a bit). I spent a long time with translators scouring all the Arabic papers for stories worth following up and, as a general rule, there aren't any. The Arabs will tell you their papers are better, because they like the social chatter in them.