The promised attack on Iraq will test free journalism as never before. The prevailing media orthodoxy is that the attack is only a matter of time. “The arguments may already be over,” says the Observer, “Bush and Blair have made it clear . . .” The beating of war drums is so familiar that the echo of the last round of media tom-toms is still heard, together with its self-serving “vindication” for having done the dirty work of great power, yet again.
I have been a reporter in too many places where public lies have disguised the culpability for great suffering, from Indochina to southern Africa, East Timor to Iraq, merely to turn the page or switch off the news-as-sermon, and accept that journalism has to be like this – “waiting outside closed doors to be lied to”, as Russell Baker of the New York Times once put it. The honourable exceptions lift the spirits. One piece by Robert Fisk will do that, regardless of his subject. An eyewitness report from Palestine by Peter Beaumont in the Observer remains in the memory, as singular truth, along with Suzanne Goldenberg’s brave work for the Guardian.
The pretenders, the voices of Murdochism and especially the liberal ciphers of rampant western power can rightly say that Pravda never published a Fisk. “How do you do it?” asked a Pravda editor, touring the US with other Soviet journalists at the height of the cold war. Having read all the papers and watched the TV,
— source johnpilger.com | john pilger | 25 Mar 2002