Democracy for the Middle East
June 08, 2005It's Not About Left Or Right
Keith Windshuttle compares the war journalism of Robert Fisk, John Pilger and Victor Davis Hanson.
Between them, Pilger and Fisk represent the nadir of Western journalism in our time. They take us back to those apologists of the Soviet era in the 1930s, such as Walter Duranty, the Moscow correspondent of the New York Times, who lavished praise on Stalin and the USSR at a time when hundreds of thousands of Russians and Ukrainians were dying of starvation or perishing before the regime’s firing squads. In his day, Duranty, who won the 1932 Pulitzer Prize for his efforts, was as celebrated as Pilger and Fisk are now, but what stuck in the long run was the epithet another Moscow correspondent, Malcolm Muggeridge, later gave him: “the greatest liar of any journalist I have met in 50 years of journalism.” Duranty and his successors betrayed their profession.
...In the face of the sheer weight of scholarship that Hanson brought to his journalism, the most that his political opposites like Pilger and Fisk could offer was distortion and invention. Pilger has made the most outlandish claims about American responsibility for the disasters of South East Asia based on no plausible evidence whatsoever, and now routinely invents the statistics he quotes for the casualties of warfare. Fisk is an Arab romanticist whose ideology so distorts his view of Islamic terrorism and of Arab despotism that he cannot be trusted to give an honest account of what he sees in the street.
From these examples of politically opinionated war reporting, it is not difficult to decide which is the real journalism. The choice is not between political left and political right but between sophistry and scholarship. One betrays the great tradition of Western journalism; the other fulfills it.
Home . Posted by Editor at June 8, 2005 09:52 PM . DFME's new internet address is www.dfme.org
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