"The great curse of our press in the West is willingness to accept the official narrative. So many people in the American press who write about the world are merely stenographers.
The great qualification you need for a journalist is the confidence to go out and see for yourself, and believe that your eyes are actually telling you more than press releases from some other country.
It's amazing to see how many people have built reputations as commentators on foreign countries and world affairs who have never been there, have no idea, beyond vague tropes, of what those countries are.
The intellectual laziness of the American press in covering the world has never been as extreme as it is now. It's just as dangerous in most what's called NATO countries to be contradicting the narrative as it is in the United States."
Stephen Kinzer
