In a post on Robert Fisk’s recent talk on Obama, Palestine, and the Middle East, Maximilian Forte picks-up on the widening gap between the neo-luddite old guard left and the emerging tech-savvy leftist blogger-journalist. I’ve always been a fan of Fisk — he’s one of only a few able to describe the Palestine-Israel conflict accurately and to a wide audience — but at the same time Forte’s anecdote reminds us that he is, so it would seem, fading fast — not into irrelevance but into history.
Fisk is a charming and easy going person who seems to feel at home among strangers, and so his encounter with students flowed smoothly, with few inhibitions on either side, and while it was an amiable and agreeable atmosphere, there was really little agreement. Many of the students were particularly interested in issues of independent journalism, alternative information networks, blogging, and counter-lobbies, and Fisk essentially disappointed them on each of these fronts. Fisk’s persistent points were that one needs a “proper” newspaper, people have to pay for the news (putting it for free on the Internet has severely damaged the budget of The Independent), and deep readers are needed. Fisk seemed to have limitless scorn for both cable television news, the Internet, and blogs in particular; he claimed to not use the Internet at all, nor e-mail. One student pointed out how some blogs have been especially successful, and Fisk’s retort was, “Yes, but you can’t work for a blog.” How does a blog pay for the travel of the correspondent, for airline tickets, hotels, etc.?
On the whole, a strong generational gap seemed to divide him from the students, as well as a different conception of how news is reported: the students seemed to prefer large, widespread, international collaborative networks with numerous bloggers in situ, while Fisk seems to prefer the lone and intrepid foreign correspondent who dances across the globe from war zone to war zone.
I left the room thinking that I might have been happier had I just heard the students speaking among themselves.
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