Andrew Butters, freelance hack in Beirut, writes about the war. The tone will disturb some, but there are some great tidbits there about the Lebanese reaction to the war (well, in his neighborhood anyway), the media self-censorship, and more.
0 thoughts on “Jaded journo in Beirut”
Good piece. I read something he wrote once about getting an assignment from People Magazine to interview Haifa Wahbe for the magazine for its 50 Most Beautiful People series. The article about the article was absolutely hilarious.
Interesting. I’m not sure the (non) parallel to 9/11 works because it was such a focused event- which only remotely touched the rest of the country – so that helping was both a healthy response and a way of vicariously participating.
Very refreshing to see such honesty and cynicism while everyone is rallying around flags. I thought some Lebanese hipsters had been doing relief work though, and read articles about Christian families in Beirut taking in refugees from the South.
That piece on Interviewing Haifa was priceless, didn’t realize he had written it.
There are lots of these guys running around Lebanon from what I can make out. For one who has been jolted into a somewhat new personal relationship to war, you might want to look at the writings of http://www.back-to-iraq.com/‘ rel=”nofollow”>Chris Albritton.
When I met him in Beirut in June, he was a bit superior and pretty jaded about being in Lebanon after Iraq. He missed his “war junky” fix. Not so much any more.
This guy should go far–writing for Time Magazine (not known for objective reporting about the Middle East–but what American news organization is?).
He apparently has a BA from Brown, yet he appears not to have taken one class from Brown’s Middle East expert Prof. William O. Beeman. He did an MSJ at Columbia, but it appears that he never took a class at that university’s excellent program in Middle East studies. Nor, it appears, did he takes any classes from Edward Said (well, I guess he did his degree before 9/11–before it became fashionable to study about the Middle East). He has a an MA in history from Cambridge, but it appears that he studied colonial American history (not very relevant to what is going on today, unless you want to compare present-day America to the British Empire and the uppity Palestinians and Shia in Lebanon to the American Minutemen).
This guy, if you read his blog entries, seems more interested in writing about young Lebanese T&A (Tits and Ass for those of you who don’t know) than covering what is really happening in the Middle East. I was dumbfounded when I read that he did not think that the Israel-Palestine conflict was important enough to even read about. (The mind boggles.)
Well, this kind of reporter has been part of the reason why Americans really do not have a clue about the true situation in the Middle East. This guy has been in Beirut for three years and he has probably not even run into Robert Fisk. His experience in iraq seems to be limited to the Green Zone (played lots of tennis there, according to his blog; it appears from his writing that he never really ventured out of the Green Zone while in the Sunni heartland), the Kurdish north and the south of Iraq (when that too was safe).
Now that he has had an interview with Anderson Cooper, he is due for prime time (I think that they are both cut from the same cloth, to tell the truth).
There are only a few good American journalists in the Mid East, most of them are British. There are a few Americans, like Dar Jamail and Aaron Glantz (but they work for the alternative media, are poorly paid–and do it because they believe in what they are doing. Butters does not; this guy is a self-promoting opportunist and hardly worthy of being called a journalist.
But, hey, they love guys like this back in the MSM corporate HQs. I should know, I worked for UPI at the World Heaquarters in Washington and AP in Seattle in the late 1980s before I got sick of all the bullshit and got a journo teaching job in Japan.
Just watch the documentary *Peace, Propaganda and the Promised Land*; if I had seen that movie before I got two degrees in Middle Eastern history and worked in both the alternative media and the MSM, I probably would have never botherd going down that path between the early 1970s and the late 1980s.
Good Luck, AmeriKa (no typo here), with journo’s like this guy, you will really have to dig to get any news with people like this writing it.
David Lawrence, lecturer Institute of Language and Culture Doshisha University Kyoto, Japan
Good piece. I read something he wrote once about getting an assignment from People Magazine to interview Haifa Wahbe for the magazine for its 50 Most Beautiful People series. The article about the article was absolutely hilarious.
Interesting. I’m not sure the (non) parallel to 9/11 works because it was such a focused event- which only remotely touched the rest of the country – so that helping was both a healthy response and a way of vicariously participating.
Very refreshing to see such honesty and cynicism while everyone is rallying around flags. I thought some Lebanese hipsters had been doing relief work though, and read articles about Christian families in Beirut taking in refugees from the South.
That piece on Interviewing Haifa was priceless, didn’t realize he had written it.
There are lots of these guys running around Lebanon from what I can make out. For one who has been jolted into a somewhat new personal relationship to war, you might want to look at the writings of http://www.back-to-iraq.com/‘ rel=”nofollow”>Chris Albritton.
When I met him in Beirut in June, he was a bit superior and pretty jaded about being in Lebanon after Iraq. He missed his “war junky” fix. Not so much any more.
Hack is RIGHT!
This guy should go far–writing for Time Magazine (not known for objective reporting about the Middle East–but what American news organization is?).
He apparently has a BA from Brown, yet he appears not to have taken one class from Brown’s Middle East expert Prof. William O. Beeman. He did an MSJ at Columbia, but it appears that he never took a class at that university’s excellent program in Middle East studies. Nor, it appears, did he takes any classes from Edward Said (well, I guess he did his degree before 9/11–before it became fashionable to study about the Middle East). He has a an MA in history from Cambridge, but it appears that he studied colonial American history (not very relevant to what is going on today, unless you want to compare present-day America to the British Empire and the uppity Palestinians and Shia in Lebanon to the American Minutemen).
This guy, if you read his blog entries, seems more interested in writing about young Lebanese T&A (Tits and Ass for those of you who don’t know) than covering what is really happening in the Middle East. I was dumbfounded when I read that he did not think that the Israel-Palestine conflict was important enough to even read about. (The mind boggles.)
Well, this kind of reporter has been part of the reason why Americans really do not have a clue about the true situation in the Middle East. This guy has been in Beirut for three years and he has probably not even run into Robert Fisk. His experience in iraq seems to be limited to the Green Zone (played lots of tennis there, according to his blog; it appears from his writing that he never really ventured out of the Green Zone while in the Sunni heartland), the Kurdish north and the south of Iraq (when that too was safe).
Now that he has had an interview with Anderson Cooper, he is due for prime time (I think that they are both cut from the same cloth, to tell the truth).
There are only a few good American journalists in the Mid East, most of them are British. There are a few Americans, like Dar Jamail and Aaron Glantz (but they work for the alternative media, are poorly paid–and do it because they believe in what they are doing. Butters does not; this guy is a self-promoting opportunist and hardly worthy of being called a journalist.
But, hey, they love guys like this back in the MSM corporate HQs. I should know, I worked for UPI at the World Heaquarters in Washington and AP in Seattle in the late 1980s before I got sick of all the bullshit and got a journo teaching job in Japan.
Just watch the documentary *Peace, Propaganda and the Promised Land*; if I had seen that movie before I got two degrees in Middle Eastern history and worked in both the alternative media and the MSM, I probably would have never botherd going down that path between the early 1970s and the late 1980s.
Good Luck, AmeriKa (no typo here), with journo’s like this guy, you will really have to dig to get any news with people like this writing it.
David Lawrence, lecturer
Institute of Language and Culture
Doshisha University
Kyoto, Japan