Juan Cole
It’s our picture of the world. The United States is a peculiarly insular society. Most people here haven’t traveled very much and our mass media, all television news of any significance, is controlled by about five corporations. We have a tradition in the State Department and our press corps of preferring generalists and being suspicious of deep expertise as a form of bias. So a journalist covering Iraq, who knows the Middle East well and knows Arabic, might well be seen as someone too entangled with the region to be objective. The American way of ensuring objectivity is to parachute generalists into a situation and have them depend on local informants. The whole theory of it is wrong. The BBC, for example, wouldn’t dream of having most of its Middle Eastern coverage done by people who don’t know Arabic.
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Good interview with a leading voice on the Middle East at Mother Jones.
