Mohamad Bazzi


Mohamad Bazzi, is a Lebanese-American journalist. He is the former Middle East bureau chief at Newsday and a current faculty member of New York University. Bazzi was the 2007-2008 Edward R. Murrow Press Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is currently an adjunct senior fellow for Middle East Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.
While at Newsday, Bazzi covered the Middle East, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, where he focused on militant Islamic movements, regional politics, and the war on terrorism. He was Newsday's lead writer on the Iraq war and its aftermath. He also covered the 2000 Palestinian uprising, the 2001 war in Afghanistan, and the 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel.

Early life

Mohamad Bazzi left his native Lebanon for the United States in 1985, when he was 10 years old. He began his journalism career in middle school writing for community newspapers in Queens. As a high school student he wrote more than 30 stories for New Youth Connections, New York's citywide magazine by and for teens published by Youth Communication. He became a United States citizen in 1994. His Middle Eastern background and fluent Arabic have recently played an important role in his rapidly rising career in journalism. He graduated magna cum laude in 1997 from CUNY. Bazzi was born in Beirut. He came to the U.S. with an older brother; another brother is in France, yet another is in Spain, and their parents and a sister remain in Lebanon. English is Bazzi's third language; he learned both Arabic and French as a child in Lebanon, and English after he came to the United States. Bazzi became a staff writer for Newsday in 1998.
In ten years on staff at Newsday, he was a metro reporter in New York City and served as the paper's United Nations
bureau chief. His articles and commentaries on the Middle East have also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Nation, Newsweek, Christian Science Monitor, Chicago Tribune, Salon, Newark Star-Ledger, and The National. Among Bazzi's awards are the 2008 Arthur Ross Award for distinguished reporting and analysis on foreign affairs; the 2008 American Academy of Religion Award for in-depth reporting on religion; the 2005 Elizabeth Neuffer Memorial Prize; the 2004 News Analysis Award from the NY Society of the Silurians; the 2004 James Aronson Award for social justice journalism; the 2003 Silver Medal from the United Nations Correspondents Association; and the 2002 Daniel Pearl Award for outstanding print reporting on South Asia.

Awards