A Newsman Breaks the Mold in Arab World

In Dubai, Nabil Khatib, executive editor of al-Arabiya, says his ideal and mission for coverage is to report information so that viewers can form their own opinions. Compared with traditional news outlets in the Arab world, he says, "We are trying to redefine the news." (By Anthony Shadid -- The Washington Post)

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Approval arrived, he said, after the victim had recovered. It was no longer a story.

"We are inventing the basic tradition of being sensitive to the public interest," he said, "and we need to fight for it."

Khatib marks the beginning of his career as a journalist on Sept. 26, 1978. He was arrested by Israeli troops in Nablus as he walked home from a Bruce Lee movie with two friends. "You're an agitator," Khatib recalled the Israeli interrogator telling him.

After his release weeks later, his older brother, a student at Birzeit University, visited him at home in Nablus.

"What's agitation?" Khatib hurried to ask him.

"It's a kind of journalism," his brother said.

"I thought, well, if that's journalism, maybe I should become a reporter," Khatib said.

In 1980, Khatib left for the Soviet Union on a scholarship, studying "socialist journalism" at the Belarusan State University in Minsk. Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, and Khatib -- as he recalls, at 19, "enthusiastic and revolutionary" -- decided to fight with the Palestinian forces. He never made it to a besieged Beirut, where two friends were killed. He was instead stranded in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley -- far from the battle, with no training or support and a lot of time for introspection.

"I thought, why am I here?" he said. He came to doubt politics and its manipulations. "As a politician, you need to use people, and I don't like to be used and I don't like to use people. This is a game being played all over the world, and I just don't like it, and I don't want to be part of it."

The experience left him reticent about righteous claims to certainty. "Since then," he said, "the only thing I feel strongly about is that I shouldn't feel strongly about what is right and wrong."

He eventually returned to the West Bank, where he was hired as a correspondent by the Middle East Broadcasting Co. He became bureau chief, splitting his time teaching journalism at Birzeit University. In 2004, he was brought to al-Arabiya.

As he smoked in the stairwell, he thought back to what he knew two decades ago and what he feels now.