Barbara Crossette

Barbara Crossette (born July 12, 1939 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) is an American journalist and author. In a long career at The New York Times she served as an editor and as the paper's chief correspondent in Southeast Asia and South Asia. She was the Times' United Nations bureau chief from 1994 to 2001. Crossette’s extensive writings on India have been viewed as prejudiced against that country.

Career

Crossette, now United Nations correspondent for The Nation,^[1] is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a trustee of the Carnegie Council on Ethics in International Affairs and a member of the editorial advisory board of the Foreign Policy Association.

She is the author of So Close to Heaven: The Vanishing Buddhist Kingdoms of the Himalayas (1995) and The Great Hill Stations of Asia (1998). The latter was a New York Times notable book of the year in 1998. Among her awards are a 1992 George Polk award for her coverage of the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi, a 2008 Fulbright prize for her contributions to international understanding and the 2010 Shorenstein prize for her writings on Asia, awarded jointly by the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Center at Stanford University, and the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University, part of the Kennedy School of Government.^[2]

Ms. Crossette has been an adjunct faculty member at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, the Ferris Visiting Professor on Politics and the Press at Princeton University, and a seminar leader on international affairs for Bard College. In 2003, she led a workshop at the Royal University of Phnom Penh for journalists from Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and Burma. She was a Knight International Press Fellow in Brazil In 2004–2005.

Criticism and controversies

Crossette has written extensively on India, and has been accused of prejudice against the country.^[3]

Vamsee Juluri, author and Professor of Media Studies at the University of San Francisco, identified Indophobic bias and prejudice in Crosette's writings. Specifically, he accuses Crosette of libelling a liberal democracy and an ally of the United States as a "rogue nation" and describing India as "pious," "craving," "petulant," "intransigent," and "believes that the world's rules don't apply to it". Juluri identifies these attacks as part of a racist postcolonial/neocolonial discourse used by Crosette to attack and defame India and encourage racial prejudice against Indian Americans.^[4]

A 2010 Crossette article in Foreign Policy magazine described India as a country "that often gives global governance the biggest headache."^[5] An Indian journalist Nitin Pai, in his rebuttal,^[6] described the piece as a newsroom-cliche, utterly biased and factually incorrect. Crossette's opposition to India's support of Bangladeshi independence has been especially widely discredited for its lack of understanding of the history and international politics of the subcontinent.

Bibliography

• India: Old Civilization in a New World. New York: Foreign Policy Association, 2000. ISBN 0-87124-193-5 ISBN 978-0871241931
• The Great Hill Stations of Asia. Basic Books, 1998. ISBN 0-8133-3326-1 ISBN 978-0813333267
• So Close to Heaven: The Vanishing Buddhist Kingdoms of the Himalayas. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995. ISBN 0-679-41827-X ISBN 978-0679418276
• India Facing the 21st Century. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. ISBN 0-253-31577-8 ISBN 978-0253315779

References

External links

• Appearances on C-SPAN
  • Booknotes interview with Crossette on The Great Hill Stations of Asia, August 23, 1998.