Robert Fisk is on the road promoting his new book, The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East. Antonia Zerbisias reports that Fisk “doesn’t give a Flying Fisk about Fisking,” and that Fisk had this to say about the media’s coverage of the Iraq War:
Right now, coverage of the war in Iraq has been reduced to “mouse journalism,” says Fisk. That’s because it’s too dangerous for journalists to venture into the streets for more than 20 minutes or so. That’s all it takes for a cellphone call to be placed and a car of men to arrive.
“NBC lives behind a kind of cage on the 7th floor of a hotel. Their armed security men tell them they can use the café downstairs but not the swim pool which is overlooked by an apartment block in which Iraqis live. The Associated Press lives behind two steel walls in the Palestine Hotel. It takes 10 minutes to negotiate your way into the newsroom. The New York Times has a stockade of concrete and steel with four watchtowers and Iraqis wearing T-shirts with New York Times on them and armed with Kalashnikov rifles.
“My objection is not that they don’t leave their hotels,” says Fisk. “My objection is that they don’t tell their readers, listeners and viewers that they don’t leave their hotels - giving the impression that they can make a tour d’horizon, they can check out stories on the streets.”
But that’s okay, because the U.S. Military is taking up the slack by having troops write the stories and then paying the Iraqi press to print them. (See below.)
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