Barbara Crossette (born 12 July 1939 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) is a controversial American journalist and instructor in journalism.
She was a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. During her assignment, she was Southeast Asia bureau chief of the newspaper from 1988 to 1991, and later United Nations bureau chief from 1994 to 2001. She is on the advisory board of New York University's Institute for Global Studies. Lately, her articles have appeared in The Nation.
Criticism and Controversies: Allegations of Indophobiamoreless
Crossette has written extensively on India and Indo-centric themes, but most of her work, if not all, has been severely criticized by scholars from around the world for being factually inaccurate, lacking research and vitiated by prejudice against India.
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 describing India as a "villain", "evil" and "the biggest headache in Asia" was panned by many journalists and scholars. An Indian journalist Nitin Pai, in his rebuttal, described the piece as a newsroom-cliche, utterly biased and factually incorrect.