Aren't the media wonderful?

Kevin Myers has an excellent article in the Irish Independent that takes apart an interview with Robert Fisk. Mostly he takes apart Fisk himself but the interviewer, Pat Kenny gets it in the neck, too.

You could argue that taking Robert Fisk apart (or fisking as it is popularly known) is akin to shooting fish in a barrel but, for some incomprehensible reason, the man is still being taken seriously by large swathes of the media.

The whole article is worth reading as there are far too many goodies in it to quote but here is one that made me laugh out loud:

It was typical of the adolescent level of this self-loathing that Robert Fisk referred to Mitt Romney's recent address in Jerusalem, in which, said Fisk, the US republican candidate "made the extraordinary racist comment that the Israelis were ahead of the Palestinians, i.e, the Palestinians were an uncivilised people, presumably because they had brown eyes and weren't Christian".

Curiously enough I can think of a large number of Israelis who have brown eyes and are not Christian. (I can also think of some who are Christian and who are not subjected to the sort of horrors Palestinian Christians are, but let that pass.)

While we are on the subject of the media and its curious coverage of events, let us have a quick look at what is going on in the Presidential elections on the other side of the Pond where an extraordinary amount of attention has been paid to a tape of Romney speaking at a private fund-raising event and making some comments about people who live off the state probably not voting for him. To be fair, our media has been going dulalee over that story as well and ignoring various unappetizing matters to do with the sitting President.

Well, you know, it seems that the "unedited" tape has one or two minutes missing. Here is Legal Insurrection pursuing the story. An awful lot can be said in one or two minutes, as I know all too well, having been an interpreter at various times.