Those writers on the Middle East in Western media: where do they get their education about the region from?

This is about the Jordanian monarchy: "special authority in the Muslim world."  If you tell any Muslim worldwide that the buffoonish king of Jordan has a "special authority in the Muslim world", he/she will be laughed at.  But then again: for decades, Western US newspapers were telling me that the Palestinian people wanted King Khusayn (as Shimon Peres would call him) as their sole leader.