I sat out J-term in terms of blogging, being bogged down in teaching my course on Orientalism, but as the Spring term begins I have convinced myself that I have time to procrastinate creatively again. In the last few days I have run across two different blogs that have taken issue with the Times’ coverage of the Middle East. The first comes off a new blog on Yemen (itself replacing the lamented Waq al-Waq, Gregory Johnsen has decided that he should probably finish his PhD instead of educating the rest about Yemen, but his co-blogger Brian O’Neill has struck out on his own). Here Brian O’Neill rips into Thomas Friedman’s recent op-ed on Yemen, not in itself a difficult task, but being a journalist himself, Brian pays close attention to Friedman’s rhetoric.
A different affair is that of the debate surrounding Ethan Bronner, Jerusalem Bureau Chief for the Times. Over at The Angry Arab, Asad Abukhalil’s blog (a Lebanese Anarchist/secularist who teaches at UC Stanislaus, and a bitter critic of Israel) there was an interesting exchange between him and Ethan Bronner a while back about the lack of Arabic speaking reporters at the Times. See here.
More recently (in the last few days), however the story of Ethan Bronner’s son serving in the IDF has surfaced, and this has occasioned commentary in the blogosphere by Abukhalil, Abunimah who also has a post over at Mondoweiss.
I’m just reading up on all this myself, but think that the whole debate raises important questions about the presuppositions that US journalists bring with them when they report on the Middle East.
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Tom Friedman aside, it’s worth noting that many of Ethan Brommer’s articles are augmented by contributions from Taghreed al-Khodary, a Gazan reporter. Granted, she and other voices like hers could probably be heard from more often.
This is something, which is taken up both by Asad Abukhalil (who apparently doesn’t care at all for al-Khodary’s reporting; see here: http://angryarab.blogspot.com/2008/12/taghreed-el-khodary.html) and Abunimah, the latter of which notes that the Times is perfectly happy to have Taghreed al-Khodary report on Palestinian affairs, but that they never assign a Palestinian or someone of Arab descent to report on Israeli Jews. Also note that Abukhalil has an unnamed guest state that Taghreed al-Khodary doesn’t get along with or like Bronnerer. A lot of this is gossip (but hey, here we are in blogosphere), still I don’t give the Times too much credit for al-Khodary.