Journos Draw Their Daggers on Robert Fisk

March 25, 2012 15:27 by

Robert Fisk

Looks like Robert Fisk burned his bridges with foreign correspondents with his too pious commentary about war reporting today and the deaths of Marie Colvin and Remi Ochlik in Homs.

Here are the two particular snippets drawing his colleagues’ ire:

  1. “But on the streets, a different impression emerges: that the lives of Western reporters are somehow more precious, more deserving, more inherently valuable than those of the “foreign” civilians who suffer around them.”
  2. “Funny, though, that the newsrooms of London and Washington didn’t have quite the same enthusiasm to get their folk into Gaza as they did to get them into Homs. Just a thought. A very unhappy one.”

According to Private Eye (via Harry’s Place) Fisk is getting bashed in The Vulture Club. That’s a closed Facebook forum for foreign journos and aid workers who work in war zones: 

As a matter of fact, western reporters did get round the Israeli army’s restrictions on journalists during its war with Hamas. Led by Bruno Stevens, a brave Belgian photographer, 30 found a way in over the Egyptian border. Fisk’s innuendo that foreign hacks were glory-hunters for exposing the deaths of Syrians, and hypocrites for ignoring the deaths of Palestinians, has put the war correspondents on the war path.

On the Vulture Club’s web page, Lulu Garcia-Navarro, foreign correspondent for America’s National Public Radio, describes Fisk’s article as “unconscionable”. Catherine Philp, US correspondent for the Times, says Fisk “makes it up”. Dan Murphy of the Christian Science Monitor tells of Fisk writing a piece attacking the Baghdad press corps for being “hotel journalists” who dared not go onto the streets, while rarely leaving the safety of the hotel pool himself.

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28 Comments

28 Comments → “Journos Draw Their Daggers on Robert Fisk”

  1. Len Kurtz

    7:01 am

    Jun 20, 2012

    Messages have been written on bombs since at least the First World War. I guess it is only a controversy when Jews do it.

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  2. srew you extremist

    4:12 pm

    Aug 21, 2012

    “ISRAEL IS IN THE MIDST OF A BATTLE FOR PUBLIC OPINION”
    AND IT’S LOSING HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

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  3. Len Kurtz

    7:41 pm

    Aug 21, 2012

    I feel proud! I actually got a mental defective to respond to my comment. And check out the moniker for the respondent.

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  4. Zaahir

    9:50 pm

    Mar 15, 2013

    Fisk is the best middle Easter correspondent. American journalism’s absolute fetish with facts while turning its back on the larger truth is, thankfully, not shared by Fisk. He is someone who doesn’t claim that he reports ‘objectively’, he writes what the ‘mainstream American and British organizations are too scared to report. I hope more Forriegn correspondents learn some Fisking.

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