The Journalism of Warfare
by Keith Windschuttle
excerpt:
When journalists like Fisk look at terrorists like bin Laden, they do not see people who disgrace themselves and their religion with cowardly acts of terrorism against civilian men, women, and children. Instead, they see freedom fighters. During the American invasion of Iraq in April 2003, at the same time as television viewers were watching the American army reach the outskirts of Baghdad and capture the airport, Fisk was in a bus with other journalists inside the city. On April 8 he filed a report worthy of the former Iraqi information minister himself. Fisk said:
The road to the front in central Iraq is a place of fast-moving vehicles, blazing Iraqi anti-aircraft guns, tanks and trucks hidden in palm groves, a train of armoured vehicles… . How, I kept asking myself, could the Americans batter their way through these defences? For mile after mile they go on, slit trenches, ditches, earthen underground bunkers, palm groves of heavy artillery and truck loads of combat troops in battle fatigues and steel helmets. Not since the 1980–88 Iran-Iraq War have I seen the Iraqi Army deployed like this.
Paul McGeogh, a leftist journalist from the Sydney Morning Herald who was accompanying Fisk at the time, later told a radio interviewer:
Robert gets a bit windy from time to time. I was on the same bus as him and we saw some tanks, you wouldn’t say we saw an army of tanks. We saw two or three tanks on that bus run. We saw multiple rocket launchers. We saw a convoy of two or three trucks of soldiers pausing to wash and eat by a creek. But we didn’t see an army forming up for war.
Despite this incapacity for seeing what is directly in front of him, Fisk likes to portray himself as a humble reporter who simply tells it like it is. “My job is to report what I have seen,” he tells an interviewer in the newly published anthology, Tell Me Lies, a collection of left-wing analyses of the reporting of the Iraq war.[1]
And the bottom line on Fisk, by Windschuttle:
Fisk is an Arab romanticist whose ideology so distorts his view of Islamic terrorism and of Arab despotism that he cannot be trusted to give an honest account of what he sees in the street.
http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/23/jun05/windschuttle.htm
