Stephen Kinzer is an American author, journalist and academic. A former New York Times correspondent, he has published several books, and currently writes for several newspapers and news agencies.
Reporting career
During the 1980s, Kinzer covered revolutions and social upheaval in Central America, and wrote his first book, Bitter Fruit, about military coups and destabilization in Guatemala during the 1950s. In 1990, The New York Times appointed Kinzer to head its Berlin bureau, from which he covered Eastern and Central Europe as they emerged from Soviet bloc. Kinzer was the New York Times chief in the newly established bureau in Istanbul from 1996 to 2000. Upon returning to the United States, Kinzer became the newspaper's culture correspondent, based in Chicago, as well as teaching at Northwestern University. Kinzer then took up residence in Boston and began teaching journalism and United States foreign policy at Boston University. He has written several non-fiction books about Turkey, Central America, Iran, and the US overthrow of foreign governments from the late 19th century to the present, as well as Rwanda's recovery from genocide. Kinzer also contributes columns to The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, and The Boston Globe. He is a Senior Fellow in International and Public Affairs at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University.
Views
Kinzer's reporting on Central America was criticized by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky in their book Manufacturing Consent, which cited Edgar Chamorro in his interview by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting describing Kinzer as: In chapter two of Manufacturing Consent, Kinzer is criticized for deploying no skepticism in his coverage of the murders of GAM leaders in Guatemala and for "generally employ an apologetic framework" for the Guatemalan military state: Chomsky later expanded on this in an interview published in the 2002 collection Understanding Power: Kinzer has since that time criticized what he regards as an interventionistforeign policy of the United States toward Latin America and more recently the Middle East. In Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change From Hawaii to Iraq, published in 2006, Kinzer critiqued U.S. foreign policy as overly interventionist. In a 2010 interview with Imagineer Magazine, he stated: In his 2008 book A Thousand Hills: Rwanda's Rebirth and the Man who Dreamed It, Kinzer credits PresidentPaul Kagame for what he describes as the peace, development, and stability in Rwanda in the years after the Rwandan genocide, and criticizes the leaders of Rwanda before the genocide, such as Juvenal Habyarimana. In an opinion piece, he wrote in 2016 that Aleppo had been liberated from the violent militants who had ruled it for three years, but were liberated by Assad's forces. However, the American public was told "convoluted nonsense" about the war. He further noted: "At the recent debate in Milwaukee, Hillary Clinton claimed that United Nations peace efforts in Syria were based on "an agreement I negotiated in June of 2012 in Geneva." The precise opposite is true. In 2012 Secretary of State Clinton joined Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Israel in a successful effort to kill Kofi Annan's UN peace plan because it would have accommodated Iran and kept Assad in power, at least temporarily. No one on the Milwaukee stage knew enough to challenge her." Secretary Clinton was referencing the Geneva I Conference on Syria, during which principles and guidelines for a power transition were agreed to by the major powers. In April 2018, he added:
