John Chuckman
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY AS’AD ABUKHALIL IN CONSORTIUM
NEWS
Robert Fisk & the Decline of Western Reporting on the
Middle East
“Just because Fisk was brave against Israel and opposed
Western intervention in the Middle East, it should not stop us from pointing
out his incompetence, especially on things Lebanese”
A remarkably hard assessment of Robert Fisk, but one that I think must be taken seriously because of the many cohesive bits of internal
evidence the author offers.
I liked Fisk years ago, but had pretty much stopped reading him because I thought in recent years he was really off his game. A column often offered little that was new or interesting, a sure sign that a reporter is no longer doing the hard work of being investigative.
Perhaps many of us were just impressed by a man living in the region for a long period also reporting on it. I very much did assume he spoke Arabic. We were also grateful to see a Western name in print critical of some of Israel’s many terrible abuses, something avoided by every major Western news source.
I remember the American actor, John Malkovich, seriously saying once that he’d like to kill Fisk (for his reporting on Israel), the kind of ugly incident which spurs one coming to the defense of Fisk.
The region is for most of us a kind of information black hole, owing to the dark interests of the United States, Israel, and the effects so many wars, truth being often called the first victim of war.
But I’m not sure that is much different than is the case for many other places, including very much the United States, where great power is at stake. How little is reported about the forces really driving American society.
Most Americans genuinely believe they have a democracy, rather than what they do have, a plutocracy with window dressing. The great Trump-Biden passion play will leave many Americans grateful democracy survived; a delusional notion that will serve to keep the colossal, corrupt wreck decently covered for a few more years.
Most Americans undoubtedly also believe that the Pentagon bravely defends America, instead of understanding its brutality in enforcing and expanding a global empire to serve the country’s plutocrats.
No, most Americans do not even understand their own society, let alone the societies of the Middle East, where their armies have inflicted immense pain and destruction. If ever there was a case fitting that wonderful line, “ignorant armies clash by night,” it is the Middle East.
The opposite will of course be true for Trump’s crowd about believing American democracy has been saved, but those kinds of deep and fundamental divisions in a society cannot be hidden even by America’s corporate press and vast government apparatus
