Qatar’s official media have come in for severe criticism with a number of Qatari columnists writing about what they say is their failure to cover the tragic Villaggio Mall fire last Monday and the social media community venting its ire.

Qatar Television (QTV), especially, has come in for flak for telecasting songs and serials while small children died in the mall inferno. QTV, Qatar’s official TV channel, was so indifferent to the tragic incident that it didn’t even flash the breaking news while foreign news agencies and TV channels were providing regular updates.

Qatari media on the whole failed in its duty and the result was that people here were getting updates on the fire incident from London’s Daily Mail online which was reporting live from the site of the incident, wrote Khalid Al Jaber in Al Sharq.

Bitterly critical of QTV, he said the channel continued to air ‘boring’ songs and serials while a mall was on fire in Doha and people were dying. He said Qatari media in general failed to give adequate coverage to the fire incident and it is shameful that people here came to know of it when a Dubai-based channel actually broke the story with the Daily Mail online providing regular updates.

The incident was so tragic that even CNN covered it. There are no evening newspapers that would have covered the incident and mainstream morning broadsheets did not bother to come out with special evening editions.

Critics say that even Aljazeera which focuses on anything and everything happening under the sun, gave scant coverage to the incident. “The tragedy occurred under its very nose but Aljazeera kept focusing on the outside world,” said a critic.

Al Jaber’s column said that people kept guessing about the death toll in the tragedy for eight hours until official figures were out. 

According to critics, while the incident took place at 11 in the morning the joint press conference of the Ministry of Interior and Ministry of Health was held at around 7 in the evening — after eight hours.

And although the Interior Ministry did its best using Twitter and Facebook to prevent rumour-mongering, the effort was not fully successful because in the absence of official death toll people did lend ears to rumours.

Columnist Moza Al Malki wrote in Al Raya that QTV should have covered the incident live to inform the viewers of the tragedy and that would also have helped stop rumour-mongering.

The Ministries of Interior and Health should actually have had their spokesmen giving regular updates to the media, say critics. People panicked and wanted to know what was happening at the Villaggio mall.

The situation was such that even The Peninsula received several calls from desperate readers.

Columnist Mohamed Al Ansari writing in Al Raya sounded equally furious with QTV for ignoring the incident. Nearly all local Arabic dailies were full with columns on this very issue yesterday.

Local Arabic daily Al Watan interviewed the director of QTV, Mohamed Abdul Rahman Al Kuwari, and he justified his channel’s failure to cover the tragic incident by saying that being an official channel it needed an official statement from Civil Defense about the death toll.

Asked why QTV couldn’t cover the incident live, he quipped: “It was no soccer match that we would have covered it live.”

Al Kuwari reiterated that his channel couldn’t give a flash on the fire incident stopping its regular telecast as it had to wait for verification of the incident from Civil Defence.