A 15-year veteran of reporting in the Middle East, Khatib is the executive editor of al-Arabiya, a position that thrusts him into a maelstrom of the most powerful forces in the Arab world today: crusading media and their editorial perspectives, the power of Persian Gulf money and the political loyalties it demands, thin-skinned potentates and the religious currents that buffet them, decades-long traditions in submissive Arab journalism and vociferous critics who dismiss his station as a lackey of the Americans and Saudi Arabia.