Journalists “prisoners of language of Power” — Fisk

Excerpting, editing by Carolyn Bennett

Veteran Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk spoke two nights ago in Berkeley and earlier this year at the annual Al Jazeera forum on the issue of “Journalism and ‘the words of power’.” This some of what he had to say.

Power and the media are not just about cozy relationships between journalists and political leaders, between editors and presidents. They are not just about the parasitic-osmotic relationship between supposedly honorable reporters and the nexus of power that runs between White House and state department and Pentagon, between Downing Street and the foreign office and the ministry of defense.

In the western context, the relationship between power and the media is about words — and the use of words. Semantics.

It is about the employment of phrases and clauses and their origins. It is about the misuse of history and about our ignorance of history.

We journalists today have become prisoners of the language of power.


No press independence, no “peace”

… United States and British — and Israeli and Palestinian — leaderships for two decades now have used the words, ‘peace process’ to define the hopeless, inadequate, dishonorable agreement that allowed the U.S. and Israel to dominate whatever slivers of land would be given to an occupied people.

… There is no battle between power and the media. Through language, we have become them.

Maybe one problem is that we no longer think for ourselves because we no longer read books. The Arabs still read books — I’m not talking here about Arab illiteracy rates — but I’m not sure that we in the West still read books. I often dictate messages over the phone and find I have to spend ten minutes to repeat to someone’s secretary a mere hundred words. They don’t know how to spell.


‘Competing narratives’ [lie]

… Analysis features tell us that what we have to deal with in the Middle East are ‘competing narratives’. How very cozy.

There is no justice, no injustice — just a couple of people who tell different history stories. ‘Competing narratives’ now regularly pop up in the British press. The phrase is a species — or sub-species — of the false language of anthropology. It deletes the possibility that one group of people — in the Middle East, for example — are occupied, while another group of people are doing the occupying.

Again, no justice, no injustice, no oppression or oppressing, just some friendly ‘competing narratives’, a football match, if you like, a level playing field because the two sides are — are they not — ‘in competition’. It is two sides in a football match and two sides have to be given equal time in every story.

… An ‘occupation’ can become a ‘dispute’. … A ‘wall’ becomes a ‘fence’ or a ‘security barrier’. … Israeli colonization of Arab land contrary to all international law becomes ‘settlements’ or ‘outposts’ or ‘Jewish neighborhoods’.


“Foreign fighters” [lie]

… The use of the language of power— of its beacon-words and its beacon-phrases — goes on among us. How many times have I heard western reporters talking about ‘foreign fighters’ in Afghanistan?

They are referring, of course, to the various Arab groups supposedly helping the Taliban. We heard the same story from Iraq. Saudis, Jordanians, Palestinian, Chechen fighters, of course. The generals called them ‘foreign fighters’. Then immediately we western reporters did the same — calling them ‘foreign fighters’ meant they were an invading force. But not once — ever — have I heard a mainstream western television station refer to the fact that there are at least 150,000 ‘foreign fighters’ in Afghanistan; and that most of them are in American or other NATO uniforms!


India omission [lie]

… The pernicious phrase Af-Pak’ — as racist as it is politically dishonest — is now used by reporters when it originally was a creation of the U.S. state department, on the day that Richard Holbrooke was appointed special U.S. representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan. The phrase avoided the use of the word ‘India’ — whose influence in Afghanistan and presence in Afghanistan is a vital part of the story.


Parallel censor [lie]

… Today, as foreigners try to take food and fuel by sea to the hungry Palestinians of Gaza, we journalists should be reminding our viewers and listeners of a long-ago day when America and Britain went to the aid of a surrounded people, bringing food and fuel — our own servicemen dying as they did so — to help a starving population. That population had been surrounded by a fence erected by a brutal Army intent on starving the people into submission. The army was Russian. The city was Berlin. The people had been our enemies only three years earlier. Yet we flew the Berlin airlift to save them.

We love historical parallels but look at Gaza today. Which western journalist has even mentioned 1948 Berlin in the context of Gaza?


Surrender — Journalists prisoners of language of power

… The most dangerous side of our new semantic war, our use of the words of power — though it is not a war since we [journalists] have largely surrendered — is that it isolates us from our viewers and readers. They are not stupid. They understand words, in many cases … better than we do — History, too.

They know that we are drowning our vocabulary with the language of generals and presidents; from the so-called elites and from the arrogance of Brookings Institute experts; or those of the Rand Corporation; or what I call the ‘TINK THANKS’. We have become part of this language.


Sources and notes

“Danger words” Robert Fisk lists in his piece:
Power players
Activism
Non-state actors
Key players
Geostrategic players
Narratives
External players
Peace process
Meaningful solutions
Af-Pak
Change agents

“Journalism and ‘the words of power’ — The relationship between power and the media is about semantics, says Robert Fisk” — [FOCUS: OPINION], from an address given by Robert Fisk, UK Independent newspaper’s Middle East correspondent, to the fifth Al Jazeera annual forum, May 23, 2010, http://english.aljazeera.net/focus/2010/05/201052574726865274.html


Also Fisk addresses some of the same themes and expands to the language of “terror” in a Berkeley, California, speech September 22, 2010: Flashpoints September 23, 2010, lead in: “Robert Fisk’s speech from last night in Berkeley: ‘Lies, Misreporting and Catastrophe in the Middle East’, http://www.flashpoints.net/

Middle East correspondent of The Independent Robert Fisk is the author of Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War (London: André Deutsch, 1990). He holds numerous awards for journalism including several Amnesty International UK Press Awards and British International Journalist of the Year awards. Other books by Fisk include The Point of No Return: The Strike Which Broke the British in Ulster (Andre Deutsch, 1975); In Time of War: Ireland, Ulster and the Price of Neutrality, 1939-45 (Andre Deutsch, 1983); and The Great War for Civilization: the Conquest of the Middle East (4th Estate, 2005), http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/robertfisk
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