The Globe and Mail's Marcus Gee wrote on Saturday about a recent interview he had with Robert Fisk, the longtime Middle East correspondent.

Since Gee and Fisk are on the opposite sides of the Iraq war, I was almost expecting the article to be more overtly than covertly unkind.

Gee did start out by mentioning some of Fisk's more failed prognostications (hey Marcus, do you remember your position on the 1999 bombing of Serbia to stop the conflict in Kosovo?), although he didn't offer much context. For example, while Fisk derided the notion of a quick victory in the 1991 Gulf War, many people thought it would be tougher and bloodier than it actually was).

Gee also wrote this:

In 2001, he doubted the Afghanistan's Taliban would throw down their arms in the face of the U.S.-led assault after 9/11. Five weeks later, the Taliban abandoned Kabul.

However, the Taliban maintains an insurgency, although it doesn't appear strong enough to overthrow the government. To my mind, that makes Fisk only partly wrong (assuming Gee quoted him correctly).

In mentioning the Internet verb to "fisk," which is "pointing out its errors of fact or logic one by one." Gee doesn't mention that Fisk's most virulent critics are largely on the political right -- and that some of Fisk's critics should come in for good fiskings of their own (OTOH, Fisk is adored by the political left, who are probably under-critical of him).

Gee doubts whether Fisk is a true journalist anymore, accusing him of being a "thinking man's Michael Moore who chooses only the facts that fit his world view."

There's a lot of that going around, Marcus. Anyways, here's an another excerpt:

In a Nov. 19 review of The Great War for Civilization (Fisk's new book), Ethan Bronner of The New York Times writes that "for all the awards he has garnered, and despite his rare combination of scholarly knowledge, experience and drive. Mr. Fisk has become something of a caricature of of himself."

That's actually a partial quote (not that Gee indicates it is), one that conveniently buttresses Gee's view. Here's the full quote from the actual review by Brommer:

Yet for all the awards he has garnered, and despite his rare combination of scholarly knowledge, experience and drive, Mr. Fisk has become something of a caricature of himself, railing against Israel and the United States, dismissing the work of most of his colleagues as cowering and dishonest, and seeking to expose the West's self-satisfied hypocrisy nearly to the exclusion of the pursuit of straight journalism.

With that, let's jump to this article from The Progressive: The Times Smears Robert Fisk. The article is by Amitabh Pal, the publication's managing editor:

I’m not sure what the problem is here. I have the book in front of me, and the book is very harsh on the adversaries of the United States, too, including the Soviets, Ayatollah Khomeini, Osama bin Laden, and Saddam Hussein. In fact, when Fisk gave a lecture here in Madison a few years ago, he made it a point to show harrowing actual film footage of torture of prisoners in Saddam’s Iraq so as to dispel any possible illusions about the nature of the regime. What Bronner seems to have an issue with is Fisk’s criticism of Israel and the United States, criticism that he seems to dismiss a priori as illegitimate if it crosses a certain line. Maybe this isn’t too surprising. Bronner was dubbed by the vehemently pro-Israel Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) as “one of the most fair and informed foreign reporters ever to cover Israel” back when he was with the Boston Globe.

Bronner also chides Fisk for castigating Western reporting on the Middle East. But Bronner should know how awful it has been. He works at the New York Times, where Judith Miller was busy legitimizing the Iraq War by repeating Ahmad Chalabi’s lies on the front page.

Additionally, it was the Times’ uncritical acceptance of the notion of “objectivity,” a notion that Bronner faults Fisk for questioning, that helped the Bush Administration lead the United States into the Iraq mess, since it hindered the paper from reporting the truth. The Times didn’t even do “objectivity” well, since it failed to balance critics of the war with its proponents. And even though it was clear that the Bush Administration was trying to pull one over on the American people in the lead-up to the war, that fact got lost in the “objectivity” shuffle.

There was no mention of this important context about Bronner or the NYT when Gee used that partial quote. Draw your own conclusions.

Gee wrote about a "widely ridiculed" article in 2001 when Fisk described being assaulted by Afghan refugees and attacked with rocks. Fisk said if he were in their shoes, he would have done the same thing.

Pal said this:

This is carrying Western self-criticism and empathy for the oppressed to an extreme, and I would hope that Fisk, in their shoes, would not have resorted to violence. But this article certainly doesn’t render invalid the good work that Fisk has done through the decades.

Gee finished off by saying Osama bin Laden recommended people read his interviews with Fisk because "I consider him to be neutral."

Depends on how you interpret the remark. I think that Gee, who described Fisk in that paragraph as "the world's most opinionated reporter" meant it to be interpreted ironically.

Here is how Bronner treated the attack/neutral stuff:

After reading that and his description of Palestinian suicide bombings as inevitable, you are not surprised to learn that Osama bin Laden urged Americans last year to listen to his interviews with Mr. Fisk because, the mass-murdering founder of Al Qaeda noted, Mr. Fisk was "neutral."

I haven't had an opportunity to read the full interviews yet. Neither Bronner nor Gee say anything about the content of those interviews, preferring to let the implication that Fisk is a propaganda tool of al Qaeda just hang there. Nice, boys.