Earlier this month, CNN fired Octavia Nasr, its senior editor on Middle Eastern affairs, for tweeting about the death of Lebanese cleric Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, Nasr's tweet said she was "sad" to hear of the cleric's passing and that he was "one of Hezbollah's giants I respect a lot.."

According to an internal memo, Nasr's "credibility" had been "compromised."

Fadlallah was a complex and controversial figure, who gained notoriety in the U.S. in 1980s because of his alleged ties to the then -nascent militant group Hezbollah. As a Grand Ayatollah, he was Lebanon's highest ranking Shiite cleric, on par with Iran's Grand Ayatollah Ali Khameini. Yet, he's considered more progressive, especially on issues regarding women's rights.

To the US, he was a militant firebrand, a terrorist who condones suicide attacks against Israeli military and someone who supported the 1983 bombings of the US marine barracks in Lebanon. He was, however, also one of the Muslim world's first religious clerics to speak out against the attacks of September 11.

How is it that Nasr, a Christian Arab-American "enlightened" journalist could respect an extremist Shiite cleric? And should that respect be cause for her dismissal?

In other words, is there more to Fadlallah than what more American news consumers are led to believe, and are journalists reporting the whole story on the Middle East's most controversial figures?

Pulitzer prize winner and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman is one of the few high-profiled journalists to defend Nasr. He called Nasr's dismissal "problematic" because of the expertise she brought to her job.

"We also gain a great deal by having an Arabic-speaking, Lebanese-Christian female journalist covering the Middle East for CNN, and if her only sin in 20 years is a 140-character message about a complex figure like Fadlallah, she deserved some slack," Friedman writes.

Over the years, American journalists have shied away from covering controversial figures in the stories about religion and politics in the Middle East. News organizations are reluctant to stray too far from American foreign policy.  They're equally wary of offending religious groups that support Israel.  As a result, there's a dearth of complex or nuanced coverage of figures like Fadlallah and of the conflict itself. Instead,  most articles written about Fadlallah describe him as "the spiritual leader of Hezbollah" – a title that's misleading if not downright wrong. And, soon enough, that is all we come to know about him. The description catches on and journalists stop asking questions and start repeating the phrases they are hearing around them.

There is a reason why the Arab world has a completely different narrative than the one that we hear here at home. How can a figure like Fadlallah be considered one of the most progressive and respected Shiite clerics in the Arab world and be considered a mere terrorist in the US? There's a disconnect between the two stories and we need to understand the shades in between.

Fadlallah's passing will create a void amongst Lebanon's Shiite community—especially amongst its youth—and may cause a new wave of young people to turn to even more conservative and anti-western figures like Iran's Grand Ayatollah Ali Khameini. And anyone who watches CNN won't know that. In fact, if Lebanon's youth do turn to more conservative or militant leaders in the next ten years, Americans may not know why (we'll think they've always been like that) because the person who might have been able to tell that story no longer works there--busted by tweeting.