March 18, 2010

Deborah Amos's 'Eclipse of the Sunnis'

Yesterday I went to book talk that National Public Radio's Deborah Amos gave about her new book Eclipse of the Sunnis; Power, Exile, and Upheaval in the Middle East. She's...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 08:22 PM | Fulltext link (6 comments)

Sloggers slogged?

Back in December, when a strange new quasi-news outfit called "IraqSlogger" emerged, I blogged my concerns about the organization here and here. Now it turns out that Eason Jordan and...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 12:31 PM | Fulltext link (0 comments)

March 15, 2010

More on Petraeus

Paul Woodward of 'War in Context' has a good post, "Israel is putting American lives at risk", that expands on the info that Mark Perry blogged Saturday, about the briefers...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 01:39 PM | Fulltext link (6 comments)

March 14, 2010

More ferment in the liberal establishment: Friedman!!

I'm late getting round to reading the NYT today. But credit where credit is due. Tom Friedman: I am a big Joe Biden fan... So it pains me to say...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 03:26 PM | Fulltext link (10 comments)

Sullivan, Goldberg, and new ferment among U.S. liberals

There is some new and very real ferment on the Palestine Question these days, in the heart of the United States' chronically very strongly pro-Zionist "liberal" political-cultural establishment. Witness, the...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 02:58 PM | Fulltext link (6 comments)

February 22, 2010

Fareed Zakaria calls it right on Iran, Israel

Thank goodness for Fareed Zakaria's voice of sanity on Iran, at the WaPo today! Zakaria strongly criticizes Sarah Palin and those many other influential voices in the US who are...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 10:59 AM | Fulltext link (11 comments)

February 19, 2010

WaPo's hate propaganda against Syria

Today, the WaPo had an editorial filled with inaccuracies about Syria's record and just oozing pure venom for the Syrian government. The title is, "Don't expect progress from talking to...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 01:30 PM | Fulltext link (4 comments)

January 26, 2010

BBC's embarrassing ethnocentrism

The BBC's nightly, half-hour TV newscast here in the US ("and elsewhere around the world") still has much to commend it. Tonight's footage of Elizabeth Wilmshurst at the Chilcott Enquiry,...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 07:47 PM | Fulltext link (5 comments)

August 18, 2009

Registan, Bloggingheads (redux), etc

I've gotten into a little argument with Joshua Foust over at Registan, over the chronic problem of the gross under-representation of women at 'Bloggingheads TV'. This is not a new...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 01:38 PM | Fulltext link (7 comments)

August 12, 2009

T. Friedman "sharing" with and "lecturing" IDF general staff

Thanks to Haaretz's Anshel Pfeffer for telling us about Tom's recent lecture gig with the IDF general staff. (HT: As'ad Abu-Khalil.) Pfeffer writes, Friedman gave a lecture last week to...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 06:08 PM | Fulltext link (28 comments)

July 18, 2009

WaPo bows cravenly to pro-Israel lobby

On Thursday, the WaPo published the following, completely craven "Correction": -- A June 26 A-section article referred to Gilo as a Jewish settlement. It is a Jewish neighborhood built on...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 10:06 PM | Fulltext link (84 comments)

July 10, 2009

Newsweek gives us the scoop...

... in the form of the whole (PDF) text of the "Not for distribution or publication" real Hasbara Handbook from "The Israel Project". For anyone who's followed the various interventions...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 03:56 PM | Fulltext link (67 comments)

July 08, 2009

Adieu (au revoir?) Bernhard and Moon of Alabama

I was so busy babysitting my grand-daughter and doing other family business last week that I completely missed the sad announcement from the German blogger Bernhard that after five years...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 11:24 AM | Fulltext link (4 comments)

May 05, 2009

US MSM and Latin America

Our South African friend Dominic has sent me links to two important articles about the MSM's atrociously poor-- both negligent and biased-- handling of some of the important stories out...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 08:05 AM | Fulltext link (5 comments)

NYT interviews Meshaal

Today's NYT carries an important (though unfortunately severely truncated) account of an interview that Taghreed al-Khodary had with Khaled Meshaal in Damascus recently. Meshaal spelled out more clearly than ever...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 05:24 AM | Fulltext link (5 comments)

May 02, 2009

Some notes from UNESCO klatch, Doha

I got into the hotel at 1:30 a.m. last night, grabbed five hours sleep, wrote my presentation for the conference I'm at, which is jointly hosted by UNESCO and the...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 05:06 PM | Fulltext link (9 comments)

March 22, 2009

What Khamenei really said. (text)

To hear the rolling US corporate media refrain, US President Obama's extraordinary NowRuz day message to Iran was dismissed, rejected, rebuffed, and trashed by Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, in...
Posted by Scott Harrop at 11:19 PM | Fulltext link (1 comments)

March 10, 2009

A good one-stop shop for Palestinian-Israeli news

... is this info-packed and well-organized and portal page provided by Xinhua. Notice the tabs across the top, then scroll down to where the contents of these categories are also...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 08:02 AM | Fulltext link (38 comments)

February 12, 2009

US opinionators fazed by rise of Israeli right?

Normally, the opinionators of the NYT and other mainstream US media are quick to express their views of every small development in the Israeli-Arab arena. However, the resounding success won...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 02:17 AM | Fulltext link (16 comments)

January 03, 2009

Discourse suppression is hazardous to your health

... whether it occurs in the field of economics, or in analysis of Arab-Israeli issues. All US citizens (along with billions of other people around the world) are currently suffering...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 10:29 AM | Fulltext link (10 comments)

December 28, 2008

Haaretz editorial: Israel 'expedited' breakdown of ceasefire

The big meme in the western-dominated media has been that even if Israel's "retaliatory attack" against Gaza has been slightly (!) disproportionate, still, it was justified because after all it...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 03:14 PM | Fulltext link (3 comments)

December 05, 2008

Pogrom in Hebron? NYT ignores...

Haaretz's Ami Issacharoff had some striking reporting of the rampage militant Israeli settlers in Hebron went on through the Palestinian parts of the city yesterday, after the IDF evicted some...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 12:36 PM | Fulltext link (6 comments)

October 20, 2008

A marriage made in heaven: Miller and Fox

Cue the violins... Howard Kurtz reports that Fox News has hired disgraced propagandist Judy Miller to do on-air analysis and write for their website. (HT: Think Progress's Amanda, who gives...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 01:48 PM | Fulltext link (2 comments)

October 13, 2008

Congrats to Paul Krugman

Huge congratulations on his winning the Nobel Prize for Economics. It turns out it's for work he did quite a while ago on trade patterns and economic geography. I haven't...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 07:19 PM | Fulltext link (1 comments)

October 06, 2008

Taleban/Talabani: There's a difference?

WaPo columnist E.J. Dionne gets paid a hefty salary and gets a lot of public respect for his claimed ability to opine knowledgeably about current affairs. But on Friday, he...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 10:01 AM | Fulltext link (4 comments)

May 21, 2008

AP's flawed 'Factbox' about Golan

Who compiles this stuff, anyway? As a supposed aid to people seeking to understand the background to the latest news about the proximity talks between Syria and Israel in Turkey,...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 10:50 PM | Fulltext link (15 comments)

May 17, 2008

Western MSM on Asian disasters, contd.

I see that China Hand has posted an excellent analysis of the western MSM's highly politicized (and sometimes just plain inaccurate) reporting on the "Western aid workers and Myanmar" story,...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 10:54 AM | Fulltext link (0 comments)

April 17, 2008

WaPo pulls a Lee Bollinger on Mahmoud Zahhar

Today's WaPo contains a hard-hitting op-ed from Hamas's Mahmoud Zahhar, the foreign minister in the Gaza-based PA caretaker government. Zahhar is leading a six-man Hamas delegation that yesterday crossed from...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 09:55 AM | Fulltext link (4 comments)

April 13, 2008

Carter quite right-- On Olympics, Hamas, and Nepali elections

I just watched this clip of George Stephanopoulos's interview with Nobel Peace Laureate and former US president Jimmy Carter this morning. (Complete transcript here.) Carter is such a wise, inspirational...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 06:44 PM | Fulltext link (7 comments)

October 01, 2007

T. Friedman calls for end to "GWOT"; admits own fallibility!

Juan Cole had a generally good commentary on the column that T-Fed wrote yesterday calling for an end to the GWOT. Juan zeroed in on the "bad for business" aspects...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 10:57 AM | Fulltext link (26 comments)

July 08, 2007

NYT calls for exit from Iraq!!!

The editorial team of the New York Times finally, today, wrote this (text also here): It is time for the United States to leave Iraq, without any more delay than...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 03:40 PM | Fulltext link (11 comments)

June 16, 2007

Kimberly Dozier: A Year Later

It has been just over a year since Kimberly Dozier, CBS News correspondent, was critically wounded in Iraq. JWN regulars may recall a tribute here, reflecting on her University of...
Posted by Scott Harrop at 06:25 PM | Fulltext link (11 comments)

April 18, 2007

Kamiya on the US MSM and Iraq

Belatedly, a serious hat-tip to Salon's Gary Kamiya for the very thoughtful analysis he wrote last week on the topic of Iraq: Why the [U.S.] media failed. His contention-- based...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 07:43 AM | Fulltext link (6 comments)

February 11, 2007

CNN's General cheerleader squad: Marx, Shepard, & Grange

Memo to John Stewart - host of the Comedy Channel's Daily Show: If you need new material, check out the media generals on CNN. Since at least 2003, CNN has...
Posted by Scott Harrop at 11:29 PM | Fulltext link (0 comments)

January 12, 2007

Happy anniversary, Dan Froomkin!

Sometimes-- today, for example,-- when I read Dan Froomkin's online digest of the day's major US news coverage, I think, "Oh my G-d, why did I spend two hours this...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 02:26 PM | Fulltext link (3 comments)

December 19, 2006

"IraqSlogger" warmly endorsing crude propaganda

I am not going to spend very much longer hanging around the dank confines of the IraqSlogger site. Today, they put up a post with the embedded video of a...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 09:33 PM | Fulltext link (26 comments)

December 18, 2006

Power of the JWN "pen": IraqSlogger, Pt. 2

Last Thursday I published this short post about the new website IraqSlogger. I noted that while some of the site's content seemed interesting, other portions did not... But more importantly,...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 10:28 PM | Fulltext link (22 comments)

December 14, 2006

What is IraqSlogger?

IraqSlogger is a new website, about to be officially "launched" next week, but already doing lots of outreach and promo. I was told about it by Nir Rosen, a feisty...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 11:23 AM | Fulltext link (23 comments)

November 17, 2006

US media and the demand for withdrawal from Iraq

Writing for Truthout yesterday, Norman Solomon had an interesting different take on the Michael Gordon/Mark Mazzetti article in yesterday's NYT that I posted about here, yesterday. Solomon's argument-- by looking...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 10:45 AM | Fulltext link (9 comments)

June 02, 2006

Kimberly Dozier: A Tribute

Those of us who knew Kimberly Dozier as a University of Virginia graduate student gasped when we learned that she was critically wounded, on Memorial Day while working as a...
Posted by Scott Harrop at 11:01 PM | Fulltext link (0 comments)

May 31, 2006

Faiza in The Daily Star

Faiza has an eloquent and well-argued critique of the major US media on the op-ed pages of The Daily Star today. Actually, right next to it is an intriguing piece...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 12:02 PM | Fulltext link (0 comments)

February 17, 2006

Some good sense from Tom Friedman

New York Times uber-columnist Tom Friedman has a pretty good column in today's paper. Basically he's urging everyone in Israel and the US (perhaps especially the US) not to get...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 08:54 AM | Fulltext link (40 comments)

November 06, 2005

Red carpet for Chalabi

Well, Ahmad Chalabi's going to be coming to Washington soon. And who is rolling out the red carpet for his "rehabilitation" there but... his old pal at the WaPo, Jim...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 10:37 AM | Fulltext link (10 comments)

October 23, 2005

The journalist's nightmare: how it ended for Rory

Yesterday, the Guardian had a tautly written first-person account by Rory Carroll, of what happened during and at the end of his recent kidnaping in Iraq. Carroll was seized in...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 10:07 AM | Fulltext link (2 comments)

October 19, 2005

Judy Miller and the U.N.

The whole sorry story of NYT pseudo-journo Judy Miller and her entanglement in disinformation campaigns concerning Iraq's alleged WMD arsenal, that were designed to jerk the Bush administration into invading...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 09:37 PM | Fulltext link (10 comments)

September 25, 2005

'The Nation' rips off JWN story?

As I noted here on Sept 21, Mark Glaser had just then put a well-researched piece up on Online Journalism Review about the "body part porn" story that I wrote...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 03:08 PM | Fulltext link (10 comments)

September 21, 2005

O.J.R. on the body part porn story

Mark Glaser got a good, well-researched story up onto Online Journalism Review yesterday about the pornsite Nowthatsfuckedup.com, that I wrote about at the end of August, here and here. He...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 07:12 AM | Fulltext link (0 comments)

August 08, 2005

Steven Vincent plot thickens

It is an outrage that Steven Vincent was killed and his translator, Nour al-Khal, was shot and badly roughed up last week. Every single one of the deaths in Iraq...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 03:33 PM | Fulltext link (54 comments)

August 04, 2005

Steven Vincent, RIP

I am at our big annual Quaker gathering in the Shenandoah Valley this week. I saw the accounts of the murder in Basra of freelance journo Steven Vincent. What a...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 08:09 AM | Fulltext link (20 comments)

July 30, 2005

Huffington on Judy Miller

Great piece by Arianna Huffington on Judy Miller, with links to all the background docs a person could possibly want....
Posted by Helena Cobban at 09:18 AM | Fulltext link (1 comments)

September 18, 2004

3 Mid-Atlantic appearances this week

Some JWN readers have asked me to post info about my upcoming speaking engagements. Sorry about the short notice, but if you live in the Mid-Atlantic region of the US,...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 01:25 PM | Fulltext link (5 comments)

February 09, 2003

Blogging in Baghdad

Yesterday, I wrote about how amazing it is to get news from all round the world via the internet. (I won't mention that the i-net was first brought to the...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 09:33 PM | Fulltext link (0 comments)