Fisk
"When nature and man conspire to expose the lies of the powerful, the truth will out".
A strange affair listening to Robert Fisk at the GFT. Certainly he has profile and stands out as a man of some credibility and (whisper it) even integrity. But its precisely these qualities that make him such a rare thing these days as a journalist. But his analysis was also pretty thin (I thought). War is bad. British and US foreign policy is imperialist. We are blinkered to these realities. We are culpable for the Middle East, the Balfour Declaration (1948) and so on are our legacy. Well yeah.
He had some good one-liners, asking: "If the main export of Iraq had been, say, asparagus, do you think we would have gone to war?" There's no doubt that this man is brave, and unrelenting in a dogged pursuit of a truth. His thoughts on the Iraq body count, and our attitudes to it, from the stark location of the Basra morgue was more chilling than when its recounted from somebodys blog in Denver.
But...but...you were also left with the overwhelming feeling that this is his job. That's what journalists are supposed to do! You shouldn't have people queuing round the block because a journalist has some credibility.
This 'Mass Media and Globalisation' touches on these same problems (it's from the fortnightly column by Takis Fotopoulos in the mass circulation Athens daily Eleftherotypia):
"It is not, therefore, surprising that, as a recent study by the Glasgow University Media Group has established, the quality of what British viewers see and hear on the Palestinian conflict, for instance, is so confused and partial that it is impossible to have a sensible public debate about the reasons for the conflict or how it might be resolved. In other words, the British media (considered the best of its kind) feed the population with news stories that disorientate and confuse it. Thus, many viewers believed that the Palestinians were occupying the occupied territories, or that it was basically a border dispute between two countries who were trying to grab a piece of land which separated them, while the great bulk of those interviewed had no idea where the Palestinian refugees had come from - some suggested Afghanistan, Iraq or Kosovo! This is hardly surprising if one takes into account the fact that senior journalists were instructed not to give explanations – as they have told researchers – something that would automatically have mobilised the very strong and extremely well organised Zionist lobbies in the US and Britain, which would not have hesitated to use tactics like sending hate mail to the journalists involved in case their reports were deemed to be critical in any way of Zionist Israel, apart from the direct and indirect pressures on the media themselves. Instead, the focus was to be on live action – a tactic guaranteed to operate in favour of the Zionist side, given that it rules out any discussion of the origins of the conflict and of the controversial aspects of the occupation. And of course, this is not just due to the fact that this is the way the medium works, as apologists argue, because it has to be assessed together with a series of other tactics used to the same effect: Zionists being interviewed or reported about more than twice as much as Palestinians; Palestinians mostly being seen to initiate trouble and the Zionists being shown to be simply "responding”; the use of words such as "mass murder", "atrocity", and "brutal murder" to describe the deaths of Zionists but not of Palestinians; much greater coverage of the deaths of the former than of the latter etc.
A similar role is played by the selected presenters of discussion programmes on news stories, ideas and so on. The fact that the presenters of such programmes (often self-promoting ‘intellectuals’), as well as their guests, are supposedly free to express their opinion does not, of course, change the nature of these programmes as ideological organs of the New World Order, even if sometimes they invite as guests selected analysts of the antisystemic Left (so that the ‘objectivity’ standards are maintained), always taking care that these ‘abnormal’ voices constitute an extreme minority of the participants, so that they can be comfortably drowned out by the pro-establishment ones. In other words, it is enough for the TV channels to select ‘rightly thinking’ presenters in order for the role of these programmes as ideological organs of the New order to be secured. This is why the presenters of such programmes, as a rule, come from the ideological space of neoliberalism, social-liberalism or the reformist Left and, as such, do not challenge the system of the market economy itself and its political complement."
Full article here.
