Death of an Assad apologist

From Robert Fisk's obituary in the Times:

While he was an outstandingly poetic writer, he developed an emotional obsession with the plight of the Palestinian people and a visceral dislike of the Israeli government and its allies, especially America. In the jargon of news reporting he “went native”, unable to provide a dispassionate account of events and their context.

Well yes. The term "fisking" - a point-by-point refutation of a clearly biased piece of journalism - was coined in honour of Fisk and his reports. 

As Idrees Ahmad reminds us, it reached some kind of nadir in his recent reporting from Syria:

In this context when one of Britain’s more celebrated war correspondents—a person known for his acerbic diatribes against docile western journalists—enters Aleppo and sees a destroyed ambulance righteous fury is sure to erupt. And Fisk doesn’t disappoint. There is the familiar bombast of superlatives. Things are “ghostly”, “ghastly”, “frightening”, and “horribly relevant”.

But it is the object of Fisk’s fury that is a surprise. Fisk is not angry at an ambulance being bombed. Indeed, he heavily implies that the bombing was merited. Fisk devotes much of the article to implicating the Scottish charity that donated the ambulance. In his curious legal brief against medical aid, Fisk’s allies are not facts but suggestion, insinuation and innuendo. His method is insidious and part of a pattern. It merits closer scrutiny.

For the past four years Fisk has reported from Syria embedded with the regime. The regime herds him to the places it wants him to see and the people it wants him to interrogate—and Fisk appears to yield to the controlling arms of his handlers with the somnambulant innocence of a debutante. On more than a few occasions he has echoed the regime line without demur.

Take Daraya. After a horrific regime massacre, Fisk arrived at the site “in the company of armed Syrian forces” riding an “armoured vehicle” and after interviewing a few frightened survivors, wrote that contrary to “the popular version that has gone round the world”, the massacre was the outcome of a “failed prisoner swap”; the men who committed the crime “were armed insurgents rather than Syrian troops”.

In Daraya, however, no one was aware of this “prisoner swap”. And even his own interviewees didn’t support his conclusions. Most gave evasive answers. And the only interviewee he cites as supporting his theory casts further doubt on it: “Although he had not seen the dead in the graveyard,” writes Fisk, “he believed that most were related to the government army”.

The record was quickly set straight by the American journalist Janine di Giovanni who sneaked into Daraya disguised as a local and interviewed survivors without the intimidating presence of regime forces. (The Free Syrian Army had left two weeks earlier.) Di Giovanni revealed in precise detail how the offensive began, what weapons were used, and how the slaughter was carried out. Human Rights Watch corroborated her report.

Fisk was undeterred. A few months later he visited “one of Syria’s most feared military prisons”. But even though two of the four prisoners he interviewed “gave unmistakable hints of brutal treatment”, even though their testimonies sounded like “stories that the Syrian authorities obviously wanted us to hear”, Fisk tried to convince readers that they were telling the truth because they “were clearly anxious to talk to us”, because the prison guards left at his insistence, and because Fisk “refused later requests by the Syrian authorities for access to our tapes”.

That all the prisoners confessed to being motivated by religious extremism or sectarian hatred, that one pronounced himself “happy to be arrested” by the Mukhabarat, and that one admitted to receiving “very good treatment” from his interrogators did nothing to raise Fisk’s suspicions. Indeed, Fisk’s usual cynicisms is absent when these doomed men—likely awaiting the grim fate suffered by at least 11,000 others—tell him that the FSA are just “thieves, killers and rapists” and condemn “the Emir of Qatar for stirring revolution in Syria”.

The list goes on...

A once revered journalist, who ended his reporting career as an Assad apologist.

Comments

[TDK]

Mick, your last two paragraphs are duplicates.

[Mick H]

Oh dear. Thanks for pointing that out.