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How Much Don't We Know? Government-Imposed Constraints on Middle East Media Coverage

(Washington Institute for Near East Policy) - Doug Jehl and Khaled Abu Toameh Of the seventeen countries covered by the New York Times' Cairo bureau, only a few are accessible without constraints: Kuwait, Jordan, and, more recently and to a lesser extent, Lebanon and Bahrain. The most interesting countries in the region from a reportorial standpoint are Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iran, and Iraq, and all of them have very restrictive visa policies. During Israel's incursion in Lebanon in 1996, the lead sentence in my New York Times article read, "The Israeli army fired an artillery barrage into a United Nations peacekeeping camp today. The attack, which Israel said came in response to rocket mortar fire...." In contrast, the Washington Post described "Israeli artillery shells fired in retaliation for a rocket barrage slammed into a UN compound." Evidently, the Post's wording upset the Syrians, and the author was banned from entering the country for years.
2003-07-11 00:00:00
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