Opinions on journalist Robert Fisk

[Ela James]

From Wikipedia: Robert Fisk (born 12 July 1946) is an English writer and journalist from Maidstone, Kent. He has been Middle East correspondent of The Independent for more than thirty years, primarily based in Beirut. Fisk holds more British and International Journalism awards than any other foreign correspondent. He has also been voted International Journalist of the Year seven times. He has published a number of books and reported on several wars and armed conflicts.

An Arabic speaker, he is one of a few Western journalists to have interviewed Osama bin Laden, which he did on three occasions between 1993 and 1997.

 

Recently he wrote an article titled “ Iran, not Syria, is the West's real target”

 

How do you rate him?

[Rand Hobart]

He is an excellent journalist though very partisan as he plants his flag firmly on one side.

I read his book "Pity the Nation". Highly recommended.

wiki

"He has criticised other journalist for what he calls their "hotel journalism", literally reporting from one's hotel room without interviews or first hand experience of events.

He paid the price for this though when he was severely beaten by a crowd of people in an Afghan village and barely escaped with his life."

[Vague_Boy]

In Iraq, we went to war on the basis of lies originally uttered by fakers and conmen. [Robert Fisk, The Independent, Tuesday 27 August 2013]

 

Does this fool not know "our boys" are fighting for freedom over there?

 

He should read the CIA's own report:

 

"Saddam Hussein was distrustful of al-Qaeda and viewed Islamic extremists as a threat to his regime, refusing all requests from al-Qaeda to provide material or operational support"

 

Well, yes, but there were still those Weapons of Mass Destruction, "capable of being deployed in 45 minutes".

 

Saddam Hussein destroyed his last weapons of mass destruction more than a decade ago and his capacity to build new ones had been dwindling for years by the time of the Iraq invasion, according to a comprehensive US report released yesterday.

 

LINK [The Guardian, 7 October 2004]

 

Yes, yes, but Saddam was evil. After all, he gasssed 100,00 Kurds in 1988:

CIA 'helped Saddam Hussein carry out chemical weapons attack on Iran' in 1988 under Ronald Reagan [The Mail, 26 August 2013]

 

CIA Files Prove America Helped Saddam as He Gassed Iran

 

Also....

 

The Pentagon's admission - despite earlier denials - that US troops used white phosphorus as a weapon in Falluja last year is more than a public relations issue - it has opened up a debate about the use of this weapon in modern warfare.

 

The admission contradicted a statement this week from the new and clearly under-briefed US ambassador in London Robert Holmes Tuttle that US forces "do not use napalm or white phosphorus as weapons".

 

LINK [bBC News, 16 November 2005]

 

Erm...., so remind me again, just who are the good guys?

[blake]

He has been Middle East correspondent of The Independent for more than thirty years.

 

oh no he hasn't. The Independent, has not even been going, for thirty years. It was founded only in 1986. Which should tell you a bit about how accurate Wiki articles tend to be.

 

Fisk's books have got worse and worse from the high point of Pity the Nation - still one of the best books to read about Lebanon in those days.

 

not too sure why some clown in reply #3 is is trying to hijack the topic to peddle a lot of totally irrelevant and utterly innacurate garbage that has nothing to do at all, with Robert Fisk. He has been a good journalist Fisk even if you disagree with his conclusions. And at least he took the trouble to learn Arabic, which even the BBC Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen did not bother, to do.

 

Fisk was as good as anybody in his early years in Northern Ireland and Beirut in the 1980s, from which the excellent if far too overlong book Pity the Nation emerged. Then he decided to take it easy and become this pontificator who was on occasion guilty of exactly the same sins he accused other reporters of being guilty of. Like sitting in Cyprus and reporting on a riot, in Egypt.

 

---------- Post added 07-09-2013 at 01:01 ----------

 

here is one of Fisk's better reports upon the occasion of the 2005 Hariri assassination where he was perfectly placed to report it. He lives just a few hundred meters away from where the massive car bomb happened on the Corniche in Beirut. This is a good report this, because Fisk despite his experience would have been shocked and also probably a bit scared too, knowing that he himself could have been killed and some of that comes through in the report. It really must have been very close to home for him. Hariri was one of the best defended men in the world, not much less well defended than somebody like the President of the United States or some other major nation is, and Fisk would have known that if they could get him using a car bomb, than they could, and still can, get anybody.

 

The Killing of Mr Lebanon

By Robert Fisk

 

I saw the blast wave coming down the Corniche. My home was only a few hundred meters from the detonation and my first instinct was to look up, to search for the high-altitude Israeli planes that regularly break the sound barrier over Beirut. There were customers coming bloodied from their broken-windowed restaurants and the great cancerous stain of smoke rising from the road outside the St. George Hotel.

 

Beirut is my home-away-from-home, home from the dangers of Baghdad, and now here was Baghdad in Lebanon, a St. Valentine’s Day massacre in the streets of one of the Middle East’s safest cities. I ran down the Corniche, everyone else fleeing in the opposite direction, and walked into a mass of rubble and flaming cars. There was a man, a big, plump man lying on the pavement opposite the still-derelict, war-damaged hotel, a sack, it seemed, except for the skull, the top missing. And there was a woman’s hand in the road, still in a glove. There were bodies burning in a car, flaming away, a terrible hand hanging outside a motorist’s window.

 

There were still no policemen, no ambulances, no fire brigade. The petrol tanks of the cars were starting to explode, spraying fire across the street. No one could take in the extent of the damage because of the heat and the smoke. Then I recognized one of Rafiq Hariri’s bodyguards, standing in terror. “The big man has gone,” he said. The Big Man? Hariri? At first I thought that Lebanon’s former prime minister, “Mr. Lebanon,” the man who more than anyone else rebuilt this city from the ashes of civil war, must have left, “gone” away, escaped.

 

But how could he have escaped this funeral pyre? A group of cops ran into the devastation, and a man, another bodyguard, ran shrieking toward a set of burning Mercedes limousines crying “Ya-allah,” calling upon God to be his witness. Hariri traveled only in a convoy of heavily armored Mercedes. No wonder the explosion was so massive. It would have to be to rip open the armored doors. I followed a plainclothes detective past a still-burning car—there was another body inside, cowled in flames—to the edge of a pit. It was at least 15 feet deep. This was the crater. I slowly clambered down the edge. All that was left of the car bomb were a few pieces of metal an inch long. The blast had sent another car, perhaps one of Hariri’s, soaring through the air into the third floor of the empty hotels annex, where it was still burning fiercely.

 

Hariri, I kept repeating. I had sat with him many times, for interviews, at press conferences, at lunches and dinners. He once spoke most movingly about the son he lost in a driving accident in America. He had said he believed in the afterlife. He had many enemies. Political enemies in Lebanon, Syrians who suspected—correctly—that he wanted them out of Lebanon, real estate enemies—for he had personally purchased large areas of Beirut—and media enemies because he owned a newspaper and a television station.

 

But he could be a good and kind man, even if he was a ruthless businessman; I once compared him to the cat which eats the canary then cheerfully admits that it tasted good. He sent the quotation off to his friends. His hand was one of the mightiest I had ever shaken.

 

I could not see his body. But amid the smoke and fire, I looked beyond to the new Beirut centre ville, the reconstructed center of this fine city which Hariri’s own company—he owned 10 percent of the shares in Solidère—was building from its Dresden-like ruins. He had died within meters of his own creation.

 

This was a bomb that took a long time to construct, a long time to plan. Parked outside the wall of an empty hotel, few would have looked at the car or noticed that it was weighed down on its axles by the weight of explosives, as it must have been.

 

The perpetrators were ruthless men, heedless of the innocent. They wanted to kill Rafiq Hariri. Nothing else mattered. In the surrounding streets, men and women were emerging with blood all over their clothes. Thousands of windows had smashed into them and they stood there, dribbling blood onto their shoes and trousers and skirts as the first ambulancemen screamed at the firemen to clear their hoses from the pavements.

 

The length of the street was slippery with water and blood. I counted 22 cars exploding and burning. The Saudi billionaire who dined with kings and princes—whose personal friendship with Jacques Chirac helped Lebanon ride its $41 billion public debt—had ended his life in this inferno.

 

In private, he did not hide his animosity toward the Hezbollah, whose attacks on Israeli occupation troops before their 2000 retreat would set back his plans for Lebanon’s economic recovery. And while he tolerated the Syrians, he had his own plans for their military departure. Was it true, as they said in Beirut, that Hariri was the secret leader of the political opposition to the Syrian presence? Or were his enemies even more sinister people?

 

Lebanon is built on institutions that enshrine sectarianism as a creed, in which the president must always be a Christian Maronite, the prime minister a Sunni Muslim—like Hariri—and the speaker of parliament a Shi’i Muslim. Anyone setting out to murder Hariri would know how this could re-open all the fissures of the civil war from 1975 to 1990.

 

Thousands of weeping followers of Hariri gathered outside his palace at Koreitem last night, demanding to know who had killed their leader. Hariri men toured the streets, ordering shopkeepers to pull down their shutters. Were the ghosts of the civil war to be reawoken from their 15 years of slumber? I do not know the answer. But that black cloud that drifted for more than an hour over Beirut yesterday afternoon darkened the people beneath with more than its shadow.

[Ela James]

Thanks all very much, I am better informed now!

[Mecky]

Can't comment, never heard of him.

[Phanerothyme]

He has been Middle East correspondent of The Independent for more than thirty years.

 

oh no he hasn't. The Independent, has not even been going, for thirty years. It was founded only in 1986. Which should tell you a bit about how accurate Wiki articles tend to be.

 

 

The section on his career states:

 

He worked on the Sunday Express diary column before a disagreement with the editor, John Junor, prompted a move to The Times.[9] From 1972–75, the height of The Troubles, Fisk served as Belfast correspondent for The Times, before becoming its correspondent in Portugal covering the aftermath of the Carnation Revolution. He then was appointed Middle East correspondent (1976–1988). When a story of his was spiked (Iran Air Flight 655) after Rupert Murdoch's takeover, he moved to The Independent in April 1989.

 

The introduction has since been corrected to read:

Robert Fisk (born 12 July 1946) is an English writer and journalist from Maidstone, Kent. He has been Middle East correspondent of The Independent for more than twenty years, primarily based in Beirut.

 

 

Wikipedia articles actually tend to be more accurate than other sources like Encyclopedias. Which is a feat in itself since if you actually printed English Wikipedia out in the same manner as Colliers or Brittanica, it would run to tens of thousands of volumes, where as the dead tree resources scarcely amount to 20 volumes each.

 

10 thousand times bigger than the best English language Encyclopedia, and more accurate.

 

And self-correcting.

 

And multi-lingual.

[blake]

Wikipedia is just as prone to the achilles heel that all encyclopedias have always had - they can copy each others mistakes and while articles can be corrected in Wikipedia easily, they can also be un-corrected easily. What encyclopedias are good at, is when you want to find out the land area of Australia or something. Wiki is brilliant if you want to find out the ten largest countries in the world by area and population and so on, i.e. like all the kind of stuff you used to look up in encylopedias when you were a little kid. But when it becomes anything contentious and they are basically at sea. I'm not saying that this happened in this case at all, but obviously for all we know, Fisk himself or one of his mates might have written the article. Seems Private Eye makes out that half of the senior staff at newspapers have if not written their own Wiki articles, then at least approved them.

[Happ Hazzard]

He sounds like an idiot to me. Iran is a horribly repressive country which no western liberal would ever want to live in. Yet they seem happy to support it against the US, which is arguably the most liberal country on earth.

[Manlinose]

he's the reason i stopped buying the independent many years ago - his articles on the middle east annoyed me too much - he may be an expert on the subject - far more than i will ever be - but i believed his entrenched views were more suited for comment pieces rather than front page "news" pieces