Brian Whitaker (sometimes credited as Brian Whittaker; born 13 June 1947)[1] is a British journalist and writer.
He studied Arabic studies at the University of Westminster and Latin (BA Hons) at the University of Birmingham. A former joint investigations editor of The Sunday Times, he left the title at the time of the Wapping dispute.[2] For a period during 1987, he was editor of the short-lived News on Sunday tabloid.[3] The newspaper published extracts from Spycatcher by Peter Wright in August 1987 while Whitaker was editor. The title was eventually fined £50,000 in May 1989 for contempt of court in breaking an injunction upheld by the Law Lords shortly before publication.[4][5][6]
Whitaker worked for the British newspaper The Guardian from 1987 and was its Middle East editor from 2000 to 2007. He runs a personal, non-Guardian-related website, Al-Bab.com, about politics in the Arab world.