By Julia Wheeler, Gulf correspondent, Dubai, 6 July 2004

Where is the BBC office? Media City? "No, I work from home mostly," I say, dreading the follow up. "Do you have a bureau and studio at your house?"

If I was being painfully honest with curious questioners I would admit it is less a bureau, more a walk-in wardrobe.

Sad though it is, I have coveted a walk-in wardrobe for most of my adult life, but the pressure of two children, copious winter guests who have heard of Dubai’s sunshine, plus nine years accumulated possessions, have all contrived to mean that conversion was inevitable.

I have had help from the experts. One of my best friends here was project manager for the Tate Modern on the South Bank. I brought her round, gave her the (short) tour and listened carefully about appropriate lighting and optimum desk height.

OK, so it does not have quite the acoustics of the Turbine Hall, but that would not work for broadcast anyway. With the doors taken off, shelves built in and World Service programme schedules pasted to the walls, it feels quite the broadcasting hub.

Cut and paste school of journalism

My former wardrobe’s meteoric rise to fit the (very loose) description of BBC bureau sits rather well with the overall philosophy of Dubai – it is a city that thrives on facades.

Many of my colleagues are just down the road at Dubai Media City. It is fundamentally a business park, marketed to give the impression of being a hive of creativity and media gossip.

There is kudos attached to an office at DMC: the address to drop into a conversation. But the gossips would have it that some of the logos broadcasting a company’s presence are not in proportion to the smaller office space they front.

Dubai wears so many masks. The city is full of PR companies all trying to enhance their clients’ images. Operating from here means explaining again and again that a company’s introduction of a new computer system or a bank offering special rates on summer loans may not be worth ‘pitching to London’.

Part of the problem is that although things are changing, such ‘stories’ have been the bread and butter for some in the local media for so long – those from the cut and paste school of journalism.

Reality remains concealed

PR companies know that if they write a press release that promotes Dubai Inc. (modern, entrepreneurial, money-making) they are virtually guaranteed of publication in some quarters – often word for word.

Nowhere in the Gulf is known for its press freedom, but even after a relatively long stretch in the region, I gasped recently when a senior Emirati businessman compared British and UAE newspapers. "What are your papers thinking of, printing the things they do? The press should be the marketing arm of any country," he told me. "We all stand to gain that way."

In the long run, the press will surely become more realistic in the Gulf. It is already happening in broadcasting with Al Arabiya at Dubai Media City and Al Jazeera in Qatar, although both seem careful not to commit a foul in their immediate backyard.

Close to home much of the reality remains concealed.

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