Pundit Preaching Purity

clipped from english.aljazeera.net Robert Fisk, The Independent newspaper's Middle East correspondent, gave the following address to the fifth Al Jazeera annual forum on May 23. Power and the media are not just about cosy relationships between journalists and political leaders, between editors and presidents. They are not just about the parasitic-osmotic relationship between supposedly honourable 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 defence. In the western context, power and the media is about words - and the use of words. It is about semantics. It is about the employment of phrases and clauses and their origins. And it is about the misuse of history; and about our ignorance of history. More and more today, we journalists have become prisoners of the language of power.

ROBERT FISK PICKING-A'P' for PURITY : PERSPECTIVE : POWER