From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media.

Brooke Gladstone is out scribbling again this week.

I'm Bob Garfield.

Before Christmas Day, when a young Nigerian man with jihadist connections in Yemen,

allegedly tried to detonate explosives on a Detroit-bound airplane,

there wasn't a whole lot of Yemen-centric reporting going on.

Since then, many of us have had to play catch-up, and the media have done their best to provide

the tutorials.

Coming up, is Yemen the new terror front?

Yemen is an ideal incubator for terrorism.

It is the poorest Arab country in the world. Is Yemen the new breeding front? Yemen is an ideal incubator for terrorism. It is the poorest Arab country in the world.

Is Yemen the new breeding ground for terrorists targeting America?

A look, three minutes away.

But as often happens when a previously ignored part of the world is suddenly thrust into the media spotlight,

there have been mistakes, exaggerations, and a general lack of context running

through the coverage. Some of that is understandable and inevitable. The newshole simply can't

accommodate a Yemen history lesson with every story, and most journalists are playing catch-up,

too. It's enough to make a Yemen expert blogger and former editor of the Yemen observer,

Brian O'Neill, cringe as he watches the coverage. There definitely is a kind of dread.

We were very nervous about what the tone was going to be in, basically just ignorance about Yemen.

I mean, understandable ignorance because it hadn't really been in the news at all.

What is being reported about Yemen that you think is either explicitly wrong or which is just kind of misdirection?

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