Crowd at Fisk
Being very important and busy blogging people, Joyce and I have 15 minutes between sessions. So this will be just a quick impression of An Hour with Robert Fisk:
- Truth doesn’t have to be the casualty of war
- If you see an atrocity why can’t you be angry?
- Debased, neutral language is the death of journalism
- Internet is increasingly being believed in but is increasingly unbelievable
- Quoted Iman Ali: we are either all brothers in religion or brothers in humanity
- Middle East should be swamped with Western tourists, not Western soldiers.
- It is OK to be objective on the side of those who are suffering.
- Journalists should not join the proscecution, and Fisk does not like journalists who are activists.
- He neither has the internet or uses email.
- Politicians either have journalists on side or don’t care what they say
The press seem to be representing the views of the people because …
politicians don’t. In the UK one million people marched against the war in Iraq, but both the Tory party and the Labour Government conveniently ignored this. Only the press championed the anti-war stance. This is not a healthy situation, and speaks of a breakdown in the realtionship between the voting public and the politicians.
In 32 years in the Middle East he has never seen the situation as so hopeless, and people so angry with what has been done.
And on that cheerful note we are off to see Kate Atkinson. I’m sure others on the blogging team will fill you in with more of the detail and impressions of Robert Fisk. By the way, Andrew Holden was a really good chair for this session.
17 May 2009 at 3:03 am
[...] Mahon also confessed that he is “not online” (a quality that he apparently shares with Robert Fisk), and so he has to go to libraries to do research for his books whereas McGee pointed out that to [...]