From Ben: "This
explains why their coverage of Palestine was often better than most mainstream
news outlets.
"GRAHAM USHER, for many years The
Economist’s Palestine correspondent, died in New York
on August 8th, aged 54, from Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease. Based in Gaza, Ramallah
and East Jerusalem, he covered Palestinian affairs for the paper from the early
1990s until 2005 when he and his wife Barbara Plett, a BBC correspondent, moved
from the Middle East to Pakistan, and later to New York.
The
Economist had never had a correspondent specifically dealing with
Palestinian affairs before Graham. It relied, or limped along, on correspondents
based in Israel, on casual stringers and on reports from visiting editors. When
Graham was first asked to contribute regularly, he was a bit dubious that he
could fit in with the paper’s style and views but agreed to give it a go. His
father had been a union-activist printer, and Graham had held militantly
left-wing views, passionately supporting the 1984 miners’ strike and other
British causes of the time. He also worked at further-education colleges in
London’s East End, teaching the children of immigrants and refugees, and in the
early 1990s he moved to Gaza to teach English. From there he started writing for
a specialist magazine, Middle East International, and, soon after that, for The
Economist too".
