At the point I'm at in the book, Fisk has been covering the the Iran-Iraq war for eight years, and one event's coverage has been self-apologetically skewed by the world's media. In 1988, an American warship shot down a commercial airbus travelling from Bandar Abbas in Iran to Dubai, killing all 290 passengers and crew. Amongst the dead was a wedding party, all in their dresses and suits. One young mother died cradling her year-old son. The west's immediate response was justification - that there were terrorists on board, that it was making a suicidal dive for a US warship, that it was an 'understandable' mistake, and so on. When Fisk's own investigative report showed the blame lay almost entirely on the US, that it was a loss of life that never needed to happen, his report was heavily censored to remove the anti-western slant. This led to his resigning from The Times and going over to The Independent.
I'm writing this because in one paragraph Fisk sums up the importance of a free press and its responsibility and duty in disseminating information (emphasis mine):
It's easy for a journalist to become self-important about his work, to claim that he or she is the bearer of the truth, that editors must stand aside so that the bright light of a reporter's genius may bathe the paper's readers. It's also tempting to allow one's own journalistic arguments to take precedence over the ghastly tragedies which we are supposed to be reporting. We have to have a sense of proportion, some perspective in our work. What am I doing - what is Fisk doing, I can hear a hostile reviewer of this book ask - writing about the violent death of 290 innocent human beings and then taking up five pages to explain his petty rows with The Times? The answer is simple. When we journalists fail to get across the reality of events to our readers, we have not only failed in our job; we have also become a party to the bloody events that we are supposed to be reporting. If we cannot tell the truth about the shooting down of a civilian airliner - because this will harm 'our' side in a war or because it will cast one of our 'hate' countries in the role of a victim or because it might upset the owner of our newspaper - then we contribute to the very prejudices that provoke wars in the first place. If we cannot blow the whistle on a navy that shoots civilians out of the sky, then we make future killings of the same kind as 'understandable' as Mrs Thatcher found this one. Delete the Americans' panic and incompetence- all of which would be revealed in the months to come - and pretend an innocent pilot is a suicidal maniac, and it's only a matter of time before we blow another airliner out of the sky. Journalism can be lethal.It's easy, especially so in the coverage of a war, to fall into a black-and-white view of things. If we are invested in it ourselves, we naturally want to portray 'our side' as in some way better. This may have been written about an event twenty three years ago, but it resonates with the coverage of stories today. The abuses carried out by Libyan revolutionaries against black 'mercenaries', many of whom were only in Libya to make a legal living, was underplayed compared to the wreckages left in the wake of Gadaffi's army. Our media whole-heartedly supported the burgeoning democratic movements in North Africa until Islamist parties came to the fore, at which point it became a much more sensitive subject.
The examples are not as striking as Fisk's, but the spirit of them is the same. When news is clouded by political agendas and biases, the news also begins to carry those biases, which affect our perception of events. Then again, it's also difficult not to be entangled by political biases. I suppose a journalist can only strive to report events as they, and avoid impressing what they want those events to mean.
Perhaps it's because it's that hour of night when everything seems thought-provoking, but I felt like sharing that.
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