As a high school student in Morocco, I watched as the journalist and publisher Aboubakr Jamaï went on a two-day-long hunger strike after the authorities banned the publication of his magazine, Le Journal Hebdomadaire. I watched on TV as the backlash quickly took international dimensions, the ban was lifted and finally, Jamaï and his supporters celebrated their victory. Years later, Jamaï would become my editor. Something resonated with the teenager I was then: seeing a journalist use his body to protest for freedom of the press and expression.
I grew up in a privileged bubble in Marrakesh. I knew little about the inner workings of the media industry, but I grew up reading stories of journalists who cared about their legacy and how their work would shape the world they lived in. I knew I wanted to tell stories and travel the world.
I moved from Morocco to New York City to study journalism. It was a little over a year after the 9/11 attacks. The tragedy didn’t impact me directly. I didn’t lose a friend or a family member at the time. I lived thousands of miles away. However, it would eventually shape the journalist I would become.
During my second year in college, I interviewed for a broadcasting internship in New York City. The interview was with one of the network's investigative units. It was highly competitive and, as I walked into a room full of applicants, I felt prepared to pitch story ideas and demonstrate my eagerness to work in a newsroom. I naturally assumed they would ask about story ideas or about my journalistic skills. Coming from a country where journalists are jailed and hunted by the State, having the chance to work in an environment that was safe felt like a luxury.
Instead, the interviewers only cared to know whether I spoke Arabic.
Over two decades later, I am a journalism educator who works with graduate and undergraduate students as well as young journalists. Thinking back, “do you speak Arabic?” is the only question I remember from that meeting.
And I did. I had grown up speaking Darija and studied Modern Standard Arabic in school. I was nineteen years old during that interview. I had never covered a war. Morocco is geographically far from the countries where the United States waged a global war on terror at the time. I certainly wasn't an expert on militant Islam or U.S. foreign policy. What I did know at this point was New York. As a student in the city, I spent my time reporting on education, housing, and local politics. I remember doing a story on tenants’ rights in Queens. Another was about Governor George Pataki raising tuition for public colleges. But during that internship interview, Arabic, and by extension my identity, was the only qualification that mattered.
At the time, I felt lucky. I remember leaving that interview walking on air — the producer had hinted that the internship was mine. Only later did I understand why Arabic had suddenly become valuable in such a competitive field. Newsrooms needed people who could translate, monitor Arabic-language media, facilitate interviews, and navigate places where foreign journalists often struggled to fit in. What they increasingly needed, though they rarely if ever described it that way, was cultural fluency.
This was also a moment during which American news organizations dramatically expanded their international coverage, investing heavily in bureaus in the Middle East. Entire careers emerged from the demand to explain a part of the world that many Americans knew little about. The expansion was reactive to breaking news; it wasn’t a steady build of coverage, sourcing, and knowledge. Reporters who spoke little or no Arabic suddenly became authorities on Iraq, Afghanistan, counterterrorism, political Islam and, later, ISIS. As a young reporter, I benefited from that appetite for regional expertise. I was ambitious, and for a while all I saw were the doors that my language, identity and background opened for me.
Eventually, it became clear that this need didn’t translate into respect or recognition. The lack of linguistic fluency isn’t the biggest flaw in how the industry is built. Rather, it’s the pattern I’ve seen of the systemic exploitation of those who know more and yet are the least trusted to lead the storytelling. International reporting had always been extractive and “parachute journalism” did not begin after September 11. But the post-9/11 newsroom created an enormous demand for people whose knowledge would be extracted. The quiet and insidious ways in which this power imbalance works in a reporting relationship eventually determine how ideas and public opinion are shaped.
Many of us who entered journalism after 9/11 remained valuable primarily because we could provide access. We spoke the language. We understood the culture. We could contextualize, translate and facilitate interviews. We caught historical references, explained jokes, and made sources feel comfortable enough to speak. But even when we had reporting and writing experience, ideas of our own, and deep knowledge of the societies we covered, we were often treated less as reporters than as facilitators.
In my first years on the field, I mostly covered the 2011 revolutions that swept the region, from Tunisia to Egypt and later Syria. Later, I was present during demonstrations in Morocco, where I translated interviews while reporting in my own country. I worked on countless stories where I didn’t even have a byline. I have watched local journalists produce extraordinary reporting only to see their labor disappear once the copy landed in the inbox of an editor. I have seen remarkably talented journalists described as logistical support when they had effectively reported most of the story. Producing context most of the time did not warrant authorship and translation has been treated as a mere technical skill.
Words written by the late Anthony Shadid — one of, if not the best journalists covering the Middle East — still resonate with me. In his book on Iraq, “As Night Draws Near,” Anthony writes: “But on the day of the amnesty at Abu Ghraib, I got a glimpse of tensions entrenched over decades, even centuries, by deep-seated grievances and the narrative of a complicated history. At that point, I started to realize how little any of us—journalists, policy makers, citizens…really understood about Iraq. Proud but humbled, rebellious but humiliated, the country was never simply a black-and-white photograph of dictatorship and repression. It was a timeworn sculpture, born of a distant past and weathered by more recent, wrenching events. And its people were more than victims.”
In contrast to Anthony’s humility, I have also met foreign journalists who went into countries armed with a lot of confidence and little context. This is not an indictment of individuals. It is a critique of a model that rewards mobility over proximity and institutional prestige over lived expertise. There are also many smart, generous reporters working under impossible deadlines – given no choice but to produce on deadline something that their editors have pressured them to write as fast as possible. With shrinking budgets, maintaining foreign bureaus has become difficult, if not impossible, in most of the world. Flying correspondents into countries for a week is cheaper than investing in permanent local coverage. Hiring local journalists as freelancers is cheaper than hiring them as correspondents.
Twenty-five years after 9/11, I believe that Muslims remain extraordinarily present in the news while noticeably absent as experts. We are quoted after terrorist attacks, immigration crackdowns and wars. We appear as grieving parents, community representatives and victims. We appear much less often as constitutional scholars, economists, political scientists, historians or authorities on the societies we know best.
I have been fortunate to work with editors who treated me as an equal and encouraged me to pursue the stories I cared about. I am extremely grateful for my career and for the countless talented and supportive colleagues who have crossed my path. But in my younger years, I lost count of the times I felt overlooked and watched as someone less qualified received an opportunity, or noticed that my emails were answered most quickly when someone needed access, translation, or sourcing.
A friend once told me that legitimizing the locals would mean delegitimizing the foreign correspondent. I have thought about that for years because ultimately it is also about who Western newsrooms trust to be telling the story.
My friend and fellow journalist Zahra Hankir, who edited the 2019 anthology Our Women on the Ground (which I contributed an essay to), helped bring attention to Arab women reporting on their own region, challenging a long tradition in which Western voices were treated as more authoritative. She is now editing Let It Be a Tale: Palestinian Journalists on Survival and Resistance, due in 2027, at a moment when Palestinian journalists are still routinely treated as something other than journalists. “That dehumanization has helped create an environment in which their reporting is more easily dismissed and their targeting by Israel more readily tolerated or overlooked,” she told me.
That realization that we had to work so much harder for our reporting to be taken seriously largely shaped my own work and is the reason I became a journalism educator — to allow those of backgrounds similar to mine to believe in themselves, to feel seen and to work with editors who valued them as reporters and didn’t use them as facilitators. I keep learning too. Covering migration and terrorism in Europe taught me to treat Muslims and asylum seekers not simply as victims or subjects of policy but as experts on their own realities. This approach has also meant fighting quieter battles in the editing process over the words and frames that could flatten their experiences.
I moved back to New York City in August 2024, nearly two decades after that internship interview. By then I had reported across North Africa, Europe, the Caribbean and the United States. I had spent weeks in St. Cloud, Minnesota, trying to understand a community that had become central in national debates about refugees and belonging. I have covered migration, religion and identity across continents. And I watched as the genocide in Gaza became, once again, a story through which many Western news organizations failed over language, sourcing, and false equivalence. In the following two years, teaching future journalists has become my lifeline. I have been so inspired by a new generation of reporters, also from the MENA region, who are unapologetic about their identity, who do not try to be liked by the mainstream, and who are confident in the crucial need to use their lens to tell the stories of their communities.
I often find myself thinking about that internship interview years ago.
I am glad the reporters asked whether I spoke Arabic. The United States desperately needed journalists who understood parts of the world where it wielded enormous power over millions of lives. Still, the question I wish they had asked was whether I understood those places and what I thought about them. I wish they had asked about what stories I would like to tell from there. For much of the last twenty-five years, journalism has asked Muslims to translate the reality of wars on the field, to explain terrorism, and contextualize cycles of violence. It has been far less interested in trusting us to tell stories about communities we know best. Or simply as reporters.
Perhaps that is the legacy of 9/11 for some journalists. At least, it is for me.
The attacks changed what journalism is considered front-page news. They also reshaped who was considered useful inside the newsroom. While it expanded the extraction of local coverage, it still has a long way to go to give ownership of the narrative to those with the most legitimacy to talk about themselves.
