Barbara Crossette

Barbara Crossette
Born	(1939-07-12) July 12, 1939 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Occupation(s)	journalist, author, teacher of journalism
Notable credit(s)	The New York Times; India Facing the 21st Century, So Close to Heaven, The Great Hill Stations of Asia, India: Old Civilization in a New World (books)
Spouse	David Wigg

Barbara Crossette (born 12 July 1939 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) is an American journalist and instructor in journalism.

She wrote for the The New York Times for over twenty years, and served as the paper's chief correspondent in South East Asia. She was the Times' United Nations bureau chief from 1994 to 2001, and in 2003 she was awarded the United Nations Correspondents' Association's lifetime achievement award.

She is on the advisory board of New York University's Institute for Global Studies. Lately, her articles have appeared in The Nation.

She has also written books, including So Close to Heaven: The Vanishing Buddhist Kingdoms of the Himalayas (1995) and The Great Hill Stations of Asia (1998). The latter was a New York Times notable book of the year in 1998.

In 2010, she was awarded the Shorenstein Journalism Award, awarded jointly by the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Center at Stanford University, and the Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard University, part of the Kennedy School of Government.

Criticism and controversies

Crossette has written extensively on India, and has been accused of prejudice against that country.

Vamsee Juluri, author and Professor of Media Studies at the University of San Francisco, identified Indophobic bias and prejudice in Crosette's writings. Specifically, he accuses Crosette of libelling a liberal democracy and an ally of the United States as a "rogue nation" and describing India as "pious," "craving," "petulant," "intransigent," and "believes that the world's rules don't apply to it". Juluri identifies these attacks as part of a racist postcolonial/neocolonial discourse used by Crosette to attack and defame India and encourage racial prejudice against Indian Americans.

Crossette's recent article in Foreign Policy magazine described India as a villain, evil and the biggest headache in Asia. An Indian journalist Nitin Pai, in his rebuttal, described the piece as a newsroom-cliche, utterly biased and factually incorrect.

Bibliography

• India: Old Civilization in a New World. New York: Foreign Policy Association, 2000. ISBN 0871241935 ISBN 978-0871241931
• The Great Hill Stations of Asia. Basic Books, 1998. ISBN 0813333261 ISBN 978-0813333267
• So Close to Heaven: The Vanishing Buddhist Kingdoms of the Himalayas. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995. ISBN 067941827X ISBN 978-0679418276
• India Facing the 21st Century. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. ISBN 0253315778 ISBN 978-0253315779