Stephen Kinzer is an Americanauthor and newspaperreporter. He came to prominence during the 1980s when he covered Central America for the New York Times, one of the most prestigious papers in the U.S. In 1990, he was promoted to bureau chief of the Berlin bureau and covered the growth of Eastern and Central Europe as they emerged from Soviet rule. He has also written several non-fiction books, about Turkey, Central America, and the oil industry in Iran.
Kinzer was used as an example of media bias by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky in their book Manufacturing Consent. The authors show that Kinzer fails to quote a single person in Nicaragua who is pro-Sandinista and contrast this with polls reporting a 9% support for all the opposition parties taken together. The authors conclude that such a persistent bias can only be explained by the propaganda model. ("[They're] only 9 percent of the population [but] they have 100 percent of Stephen Kinzer," Chomsky quips.)
Kinzer's colleagues in the field admired him as a tough, shoe-leather reporter with a knack for unconventional war stories (such as an essay on Ruben Dario, a late-nineteenth-century Nicaraguan poet and a national symbol whom each side in the war attempted to co-opt as its own).
Kinzer is especially good at drawing out the contradictions of Turkish culture: devout Muslims who eschew pork but guzzle red wine; secular military rulers as dogmatic as the Islamic fundamentalists they so greatly fear.
Kinzer is in essence a domestic foreign correspondent, introducing readers to the part of America that lies beyond the Hudson River.
STEPHENKINZER: It's a pleasure to be with all of you, and if there are any Turks out there, or people who have been to Turkey or are planning to go, I extend my warm welcome to all of you.
KINZER: Muslims in many parts of the world are frustrated with what they see as a series of attacks on Muslim peoples everywhere.
KINZER: While he was in Sudan and while he was fighting alongside American forces in Afghanistan, bin Laden was very active in his family business, which is construction.
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