Cori, Clayton, and Fisk (Signifying Nothing: how does saying nothing at all become so loud?)

Sunday, 2 November 2003

Cori, Clayton, and Fisk

Brock noted Cori Dauber’s inauspicious start at the Conspiracy yesterday, and I agree that her blogging has been a bit uneven. However, her critique of the San Francisco Chronicle’s fawning piece on Robert Fisk is spot-on. But I think the key paragraph in the article is on Fisk’s attitude toward objective reporting:

Fisk doesn’t believe in the concept, calling it a specious idea that, as practiced by American reporters, produces dull and predictable writing weighed down by obfuscating comments from official government sources.

Of course, a lot of critics of the American media—on both the left and right—would argue that American reporters don’t practice “objective reporting” either.

As for Brock’s contention that Dauber is worse than Clayton Cramer, I think that’s about like contending that Gerhard Schröder is the worst German leader since Adolph Hitler—it may be objectively true, especially if you consider that Germany as a united country has only had three leaders since Hitler—Schröder, Helmut Kohl, and Admiral Karl Dönitz, the last of whom did virtually nothing except surrender to the allies, but the comparison is still invalid. Besides, Cramer, unlike Dauber, was intended as a permanent addition to the Conspiracy; apparently Eugene was under the mistaken impression that Cramer would drop his obsession with homosexuals when blogging before a wider audience.