Wants A Fisking

[Annie]

http://www.courier-journal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050508/OPINION04/505080346/1054/OPINION

I'm too tired, but this deserves it!

 

[USViking]

What is a "fisking"?

The author of the article in the link did not get a single thing right, as far as I could see.

Here are a couple of highlights:

(from the link)

I could go into a long litany of the ways in which the American military has treated journalists in Iraq. Recent actions indicate that the U.S. military will detain and/or kill any journalist who happens to be caught covering the Iraqi side of the militant resistance, (emphasis added) and indeed a number of journalists have been killed by U.S. troops while working in Iraq. This behavior at the moment seems to be limited to journalists who also happen to be Arabs, or Arab-looking, but that is only a tangential story to what I'm telling you about here.

This statement screams for authentication.

It says the US would deliberately, and in cold blood kill journalists covering the terrorists in Iraq. It says the US has done so.

WHO?-the recent case of the Italian was clearly a justifyable error.



(from the link):

Recall Patrick Henry's famous speech encouraging the Second Virginia Convention, gathered on March 20, 1775, to fight the British, "Give me liberty or give me death!" Why is it that we, as Americans, presume that any Iraqi would feel any differently? If the roles were reversed, do you think for a moment that our men wouldn't be stockpiling arms and attacking any foreign invader with the temerity to set foot on our soil, occupy our buildings of government and write us a new constitution?

This is flangrantly absurd. The US is not writing the Iraqi constitution, they are writing it themselves. They are also in the process of forming their own sovereign government, in a process supporeted by at least the 2/3 of the population which voted in the elections. The British never extended any such freedoms to the Colonies.

I could go on and on with this preposterous article. It ain't worth my sweet time.

 

[Annie]

What is a "fisking"?

You seemed to have caught on just fine:

Fisk
verb. To deconstruct an article on a point by point basis in a highly critical manner. Derived from the name of journalist Robert Fisk, a frequent target of such critical articles in the blogosphere (qv).

Usage: "Orrin Judd did a severe fisking of an idiotic article in the New York Times today..."


http://www.samizdata.net/blog/glossary_archives/001961.html