Friday 4 February 2011

BANNED IN THE U.S.A!












Our finest reporters are often the ones we listen to the least...

Having said that, this series was effectively banned upon transmission, the victim of a sustained campaign by pro-Israeli state pressure groups. It has never been repeated.

What is most striking about this, the first of three episodes, is the degree to which Fisk is embedded. Not within the confines of a media savvy military unit, but within the everyday culture of the people whose suffering he documents.

During the second Iraq War reports about events in central Baghdad, delivered from the rooftop of a plush hotel always seemed to jar, ramp up the cognitive dissonance of Baudrillard's TV Wars. Conflict as just another manifestation of the Big Other.

Beirut To Bosnia offers up no such disconnect, no easy answers.

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