Robert Fisk is a prominent but controversial British journalist who currently serves as Middle East correspondent for the The Independent newspaper in London.

During the 2003 Invasion of Iraq and the ensuing U.S.-led occupation of Iraq, Fisk, who speaks fluent Arabic, was stationed in Baghdad and filed many eyewitness reports. In Iraq he has criticized other journalists for their "hotel journalism", their being out of touch with the events and atmosphere of the Baghdad streets.

Fisk also covered the Iranian revolution, the Iran-Iraq war, the Persian Gulf War, and the conflict in Algeria. He was one of two Western journalists to stay in Beirut during the Lebanese civil war. He wrote a book on the conflict, Pity The Nation. Fisk has also reported the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

After the U.S. launched its attack on Afghanistan shortly following the September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attacks, Fisk was transferred to Pakistan to provide coverage of that conflict. He wrote a graphic account of his own beating at the hands of Afghan refugees.

Fisk has written about being the target of hate mail and death threats from American extremists as a result of his critical reporting of US and Israeli policy in the Middle-East. This culminated in the actor John Malkovich's public statement in May 2002 at the Cambridge Union Society that he would like to shoot Fisk as well as the rebel MP George Galloway. [1] Many of his critics accuse him of being overly sympathetic to Islamic terrorists.

Fisk has received many awards for his journalism, including the Amnesty International UK Press Awards in 1998 for his reports from Algeria and again in 2000 for his articles on NATO bombing of Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. He has also been awarded the British International Journalist of the Year award seven times.

Criticism

Charles Johnson's popular weblog, Little Green Footballs, awards an annual award known as the Robert Fisk Award for Idiotarian of Year. The award is awarded by readers, who vote for the biggest "useful idiot" of the year. This award grew out of Robert Fisk's statement following his beating by Afghans, in which he stated, "If I were them, I'd have beaten me too."

The term fisking ("a point-by-point refutation of a blog entry or a news story") is an expression that arose in the blogosphere, named after Robert Fisk.

External links

• The Independent
• Robert-Fisk.com unofficial archive of Fisk articles, more or Fisk's writing can be found here:
  • Z Magazine
  • Counterpunch