Acclaimed reporter of Middle East often ignited controversy
BEIRUT — Veteran British journalist Robert Fisk, one of the best-known Middle East correspondents who spent his career reporting from the troubled region and won accolades for challenging mainstream narratives has died after a short illness, his employer said Monday. He was 74.
Mr. Fisk, whose reporting often sparked controversy, died Sunday at a hospital in Dublin, shortly after he was taken there after falling ill at his home in the Irish capital. The London Independent, where he had worked since 1989, described him as the most celebrated journalist of his era.
“Fearless, uncompromising, determined and utterly committed to uncovering the truth and reality at all costs, Robert Fisk was the greatest journalist of his generation,” said Christian Broughton, managing director of the newspaper.
”The fire he lit at The Independent will burn on,” he said.
Born in Kent, in the United Kingdom, Mr. Fisk began his career on Fleet Street at the Sunday Express. He went on to work for The Times and was based in Northern Ireland, Portugal and the Middle East. He moved to Beirut in 1976, a year after the country’s civil war broke out. Until his death, he maintained an apartment along the Lebanese capital’s famed Mediterranean corniche.
From his base in Beirut, Mr. Fisk traveled across the Mideast and beyond, covering almost every big story in the region, including the Iran-Iraq war, the Arab-Israeli conflict, the war in Algeria, the conflict in Afghanistan, Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, the Arab Spring and Syria’s civil war. His reporting earned him awards, but also invited controversy, particularly his coverage of the Syria conflict.
A fearless, bespectacled and cheerful personality bristling with energy, Mr. Fisk was often the first reporter to arrive at the scene of a story. He shunned e-mail, smart phones and social media, and strongly believed in the power of street reporting.
In 1982, he was one of the first journalists at the Sabra and Shatila camp in Beirut, where Israeli-backed Christian militiamen
slaughtered hundreds of Palestinian refugees. Earlier that year, he was also the first foreign journalist to report on the scale of the Hama massacre in 1982, when then- Syrian President Hafez Assad launched a withering assault on the rebellious city in central Syria, leveling entire neighborhoods and killing thousands in one of the most notorious massacres in the modern Middle East.
Mr. Fisk was in love with Beirut, the city he called home, sticking with it during the most difficult days of the 1975-90 civil war when foreign journalists fell victim to kidnappers. Back then, he used the offices of The Associated Press to file his stories during the war, where colleagues called him “the Fisk,” or “Fisky.”
In his book chronicling the war, “Pity the Nation,” he describes filing his dispatches by furiously punching a telex tape at the bureau, which he described as “a place of dirty white walls and heavy battleship-gray metal desks with glass tops and iron typewriters” and a “massive, evil-tempered generator” on the balcony.
Mr. Fisk gained particular fame and popularity in the region for his opposition to the Iraq war — challenging the official U.S. government narrative of weapons of mass destruction as it laid the groundwork for the 2003 invasion — and disputing U.S. and Israeli policies.
He was one of the few journalists who interviewed Osama bin Laden several times.