Negresco/Rossetti

I met Tom, an American, at the Acceuil Villes Francaises in Nice. He suggested that he and a female journalist who is interested in Chomsky (who wishes to remain anonymous, so let's call her J ), and I meet for a chat in the bar at the Negresco - what else ? As George Clooney would say.



Tom had also just been through the fatiguing business of looking for a new apartment and I was tired from the process of moving into our new apartment.

However J is refreshingly lively and argumentative, so we soon got into a debate about the usual separation in American journalism of reporting and editorials, which J tended to support and which I opposed, and we discussed objectivity - usually identified (wrongly in my view) with balance, neutrality and impartiality.

Like me, J is an admirer of Robert Fisk, a journalist working for The Independent who has lived in Lebanon for a long time, while doing excellent reporting on the Middle East. But, as I pointed out, Fisk was also against the usual US fact/opinion distinction and the usual interpretation of objectivity as "balance":

Fisk and objectivity

"When I was close to a pizzeria bombing in Israeli West Jerusalem in 2001, in which 20 were killed, more than half children, I didn't give half the time to Hamas. In 1982, in Sabra and Shatila, I wrote about the victims, the dead who I physically climbed over and the survivors. I did not give 50 per cent to the Lebanese Christian Phalangist militia who massacred them nor to the Israeli army who watched the murders and did nothing.

In the realm of warfare, which represents the total failure of the human spirit, you are morally bound as a journalist to show eloquent compassion to the victims, to be unafraid to name the murderers, and you're allowed to be angry. The waitress who's serving us coffee, the taxi driver who brought me here, they have feelings about atrocities. Why shouldn't we?"

http://www.rabble.ca/rabble_interview.shtml?sh_itm=a37c84dbd62690c4c1abb1a898a77047

Cf:

"It's our job (as journalists) to challenge the centers of power, and to describe with our own vividness the tragedies and injustice and viciousness of the world, and to try and name the bad guys," Fisk says in an interview in San Francisco. "American journalists won't say what I can say. I think the New York Times should be called, 'American officials say.' At least, you'd know what you were reading. If journalism is about writing (stories) that look like government reports, then I'll go and do gardening or something."

Fisk's critics believe he's a journalistic provocateur who's blatantly anti-United States and anti-Israel. But Fisk is perhaps Britain's most acclaimed foreign correspondent. He has won the British Press Awards' International Journalist of the Year honor (the equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize for foreign reporting) seven times...

... If Fisk were working for a daily U.S. paper, his dispatches would always be pushed to the opinion pages, where they'd be treated as interpretive journalism. The fact that Fisk's stories usually appear in the main news section of the Independent is galling to readers who disagree with his views.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2003/11/02/INGRU2KJHA1.DTL

Martha Gellhorn

Gellhorn was also a much-admired journalist who had no time for conventional notions of objectivity and was more concerned with telling the truth which, as Fisk has said, may involve naming the "bad guys":

"Martha Gellhorn (8 November 1908 - 15 February 1998) was an American novelist, travel writer and journalist, considered to be one of the greatest war correspondents of the 20th century. She reported on virtually every major world conflict that took place during her 60-year career. Gellhorn was also the third wife of American novelist Ernest Hemingway, from 1940 to 1945. At the age of 89, ill and nearly completely blind, she ended her life by taking a poison pill.

... Gellhorn remained a committed leftist throughout her life and was contemptuous of those, like Rebecca West, who became more conservative. She considered the so-called objectivity of journalists “nonsense”, and used journalism to reflect her politics."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martha_Gellhorn

She was still working aged 87:

"... In a few weeks, she said, she would be flying to Brazil to research an article about the murder of street children. While there, she hoped to keep herself sane and fit by snorkeling as much as possible. Her article appeared that August in the London Review of Books. It had been hell to write -- not only because she had to report on terrible crimes, but because she was trying to compose by touch-typing when she could barely see the keys and the text. But her curiosity and compassion were undimmed, even at 87, and the story justified the admiration expressed long ago by British journalist James Cameron, who observed that Gellhorn "writes with a cold eye and a warm heart."

http://www.salon.com/media/1998/03/12media.html

See also my earlier posts:

France24

Cafe-philo

We then walked to the old town and had a meal and slightly less disputatious conversation, in La Fontaine in Place Rossetti:



Ted and Tom smiling for J