“I’ll come if she does,” said renowned Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk when asked if he would accompany a gaggle of students to dinner. He was talking about a young lady in the group and proceeded to ditch his official dinner to trade conversation with a group of eager fans and some nubile ladies for three hours in a dive bar.
He had just finished his stint as headline speaker at a debate hosted by the respected Frontline Club entitled “Is it over for Frontline Reporting?” It was a rancorous affair that was characterised by the trade of barbs between Mr. Fisk and his ideological adversary from ABC News, Chuck Lustig.
The crux of the disagreement was Mr. Fisk’s stern denunciation of the U.S. media’s role in the build up to the war in Iraq. “We accept the term ‘embedded’ for some reason”, he said. “These journalists in Iraq are surrounded by security guards with New York Times emblazoned on their T-shirts, and the problem is they don’t tell you of these limitations.” He termed this type of journalism “Hotel journalism”.
“I’m the one who tells my journalists to wear flak jackets,” Lustig hit back, “I don’t want my journalists to never return to their families – we make life and death decisions everyday on the news desk.”
The debate exercised for an hour-and-a-half on these themes – whether journalists have a duty to extricate themselves from their institutional protections, how far citizen journalism was trumping conventional journalism and other vexed subjects. The other panelists included Fran Unsworth of the BBC, the photographer Ron Haviv, and Iraqi photojournalist Ghaith Abdul-Ahad.
But Mr. Fisk saved his most acerbic comments for the dinner afterward. “He just didn’t know what he was talking about,” he said of Lustig. “He had no idea he completely lost his audience.” Fisk is according to the New York Times “probably the most famous foreign correspondent in Britain” but his tongue was as acidic as any grouchy bar-dweller. “This whole thing about 50-50 journalism is just a big joke,” he said alluding to a topic of conversation in the debate. “When they covered the liberation of the Nazi gas chambers did they ask for a quote from the Nazi spokesman to even things up?” he asked.
He went on to talk about his coverage of the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon which were the scene of a massacre by Christian Phalangist militias in 1982. “I mean, when I went there I didn’t ask to speak an Israeli spokesman because I knew what had happened, it was just obscene, I didn’t need anyone to rationalize it for me!”
Fisk got more plaintive as the wine flowed. “When I was in Amsterdam recently on the lecture circuit I saw lots of couples with children and I thought, I could have had a much happier life, I could have had things a lot more simple, not seen the things I have seen, not experienced dead children and everything else. And when I look back and think about what my journalism has actually achieved I can’t think of one positive thing. Not one.”
There was a vocal demurral from the table at this painful recollection. “Well, I mean I haven’t saved one person from execution, one person from death, one person from going to jail. The only thing I can think of doing is uncovering some malfeasance of the Israeli government and that succeeded in getting Likud in to power as the Israeli public were so angry at Labour!”
Fisk had been married once, to the American journalist Lara Marlowe, but has never had children. His peripatetic has made is difficult to hold down a lasting and stable relationship long enough to commit to children and the other furnishings of a “family life”. He had been living in Beirut, Lebanon, for 25 years but traveled endlessly.
Fisk then dropped the bombshell that he had got his hands on video footage from the Armenian Genocide of 1915 by Turkey. This topic is currently hot as a bill was recently passed by Congress which for the first term applied the term “genocide” to the conflict of 1915. “I went into a Church in Lebanon and saw these pictures and I asked about them and I was told they had film footage and I saw it – there are dead bodies and everything. I’m going to make a documentary about it.”
After eight bottles of wine and some winding conversation, the bill finally came: $500. “Oh my God,” said Fisk, visibly shocked. “The Independent will pay,” he said, talking of his cash-strapped newspaper.
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