Thought of the day from journalist Robert Fisk from his The Great War for Civilisation:
“I suppose, in the end, we journalists try–or should try–to be the first impartial witnesses to history. If we have any reason for our existence, the least must be our ability to report history as it happens, so that no one can say: ‘We didn’t know–no one told us.’ Amira Hass, the brilliant Israeli journalist on Haaretz newspaper whose reports on the occupied Palestinian territories have outshone anything written by non-Israeli reporters, discussed this with me more than two years ago. I was insisting that we have a vocation to write the first pages of history but she interrupted me. ‘No, Robert, you’re wrong,’ she said. ‘Our job is to monitor the centers of power.’ And I think, in the end, that is the best definition of journalism I have heard: to challenge authority–all authority–especially so when governments and politicians take us to war, when they have decided that they will kill and others will die.”
