UK - BBC loves Robert Fisk

Listen to this:

Kirsty Young’s castaway on Desert Island Discs this week is the journalist Robert Fisk.

He is one of our most distinguished foreign correspondents and has spent his life covering conflicts around the world - the past thirty years immersed in the life and politics of the Middle East.

He's "distinguished" alright, but not for the reasons the BBC thinks. Fisk has the dubious honour of having the term "Fisking" named after him. To "Fisk" an article is to point out the glaring errors in it. Some of Fisk's work is so bad people took to calling their dissections of it a "Fisking" and it stuck.

In this example Efraim Karsh "Fisks" Fisk's book.

"It is difficult to turn a page of The Great War for Civilisation without encountering some basic error. Jesus was born in Bethlehem, not, as Fisk has it, in Jerusalem. The Caliph Ali, the Prophet Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law, was murdered in the year 661, not in the 8th century. Emir Abdallah became king of Transjordan in 1946, not 1921, and both he and his younger brother, King Faisal I of Iraq, hailed not from a “Gulf tribe” but rather from the Hashemites on the other side of the Arabian peninsula. The Iraqi monarchy was overthrown in 1958, not 1962; Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem, was appointed by the British authorities, not elected; Ayatollah Khomeini transferred his exile from Turkey to the holy Shiite city of Najaf not during Saddam Hussein’s rule but fourteen years before Saddam seized power. Security Council resolution 242 was passed in November 1967, not 1968; Anwar Sadat of Egypt signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1979, not 1977, and was assassinated in October 1981, not 1979. Yitzhak Rabin was minister of defense, not prime minister, during the first Palestinian intifada, and al Qaeda was established not in 1998 but a decade earlier. And so on and so forth."

How bad is that? What was it the BBC said of Fisk again?

"He is one of our most distinguished foreign correspondents..."

If Fisk's book is that bad, imagine how error filled his reporting must be.