Fear the terrorist sympathizers!!

In the nytimes.com Q&A today with Taghreed El-Khodary, the paper's longtime stringer in Gaza, there was, as you might expect, some questioning of whether she, as a Palestinian, can provide fair and objective reporting. The paper minces no words in defending her (see the final Q&A). It's kind of awkward that they even have to do that.

We've seen the same thing with Iraqi and Afghan reporters doing much of the work for American news outlets there. In all of these cases it's not a conscious decision by the organization that the coverage would be better if it's done by someone from there, but that the only way to have coverage at all is for someone from that country to do it, largely for security reasons.

The right and in some cases center have gone after El-Khodary and many others, thankfully with not too much success, at least yet. They say someone who was born and lives in the country can't be objective (and maybe they're even a terrorist sympathizer!). But when it comes to a white person in a European country, they don't have any problem. John Burns, for example, is now the London bureau chief, and he's British. I don't hear anyone complaining about how he is necessarily biased.

The name for this all is of course 'racism'.

Some reporters are fair and some are not, whether they are Arab or White, native to the country where they are reporting or not.