Qunfuz

Ailean Beaton asked me some very interesting questions concerning “the partisanisation of basic facts” in western media (and social media) coverage of Syria. My responses describe a general “cultural slide involving populism, conspiracism and the dominance of powerful fictions.”

You can read the interview here.

And while you’re visiting…

It may be you’re thinking of Robert Fisk’s latest report from Douma. Here’s some reading:

I wrote this in 2012 when first the regime then Fisk created a grotesque ‘counter-narrative’ to obscure Assad forces’ responsibility for a mass slaughter in Daraya.

Yassin al-Haj Saleh and Rime Allaf wrote this around the same time.

Written in late 2016, this, by Idrees Ahmad, is a detailed analysis of several cases of Fisk’s journalistic malpractice. It’s the most comprehensive article on this list.

Here Louis Proyect takes on Fisk’s Douma story. And here Terry Glavin does the same.

This article at the Times mentions several older instances of Fiskian liberty-with-the-truth, dating to the 90s.

(I still remember his excellent ‘Pity the Nation’ on Lebanon. What happened? 1. The man changed. It’s obvious in the quality of the writing as well as everything else. Should have retired at his peak. 2. I need to reread it to judge the reader I was when I read it first. Perhaps because I agreed with his anti-Israel emphasis, and because perhaps I was a less sophisticated reader then, I always gave the book the benefit of the doubt. Since then I’ve heard someone say the book ‘isn’t really about the Lebanese’. And that I can believe, especially as Fisk can’t speak Arabic – though he pretends to, and though he lived in Beirut for years.)