Casey Kauffman

Casey Kauffman is an American journalist who works for Al Jazeera English, the first English-language news channel headquartered in the Middle East.

In October 2008, Kauffman’s report about a rally in St. Clairesville, Ohio by supporters of Sarah Palin, Republican Party's vice-presidential candidate in the 2008 United States presidential election, created a controversy. In the rally, Palin’s supporters made racist comments about Barack Obama, Democratic Party’s presidential candidate, including the fear that Barack Obama is an anti-white Muslim terrorist. The story garnered massive attention. It had gone viral on the web and had been the source of a few editorials.

Colbert I. King, a columnist at the Washington Post, criticized the report and wrote a piece titled “A Rage No One Should Be Stoking”. In the article he said that “it is no accident that the English-language operation of Al-Jazeera, the Arab-language news network, tried to capture and broadcast to the Middle East, Africa and elsewhere a glimpse of America’s more sinister side... Was this fodder served up by Al-Jazeera to feed anti-American sentiment overseas? To be sure. But the camera didn’t lie. Did Al-Jazeera, however, record the whole truth?”

Tony Burman, the managing director of Al Jazeera English, denied that Kauffman's report was anti-American and responded in a letter to the Washington Post that Al Jazeera’s international news channels, both English and Arabic, have devoted “more air time to covering this campaign than perhaps any other network” and that the overarching story that America seemed poised to elect its first black president “reflects exceptionally well on Americans and its democracy”.