TIMES BOOK FAVES AND A BIG NON-FAVE

December 03, 2005
Arts Journal Weblog
Jan Herman

When it comes to the 100 Notable Books of the Year chosen for 2005 by the editors of The New York Times Book Review, it helps to be an author who happens to be a Times staffer or former staffer.[...].

[...] we couldn't help noticing one really conspicuous omission: "The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East," by British foreign correspondent Robert Fisk, below. It's a massive, enlightening, beautifully written book, which, as we've said before, is unbeatable at connecting past and present, and which the Book Review hasn't deigned to review so far. This gives the Book Review editors a technical rather than critical reason to keep it from even being considered for the list.

But we think there's another, defensive reason, evidenced by Times Deputy Foreign Editor Ethan Bronner's condescending review in the daily paper, which was clearly payback for the accusations that Fisk makes against The Times and some of its reporters, names included. We realize, of course, that it's hard not to be defensive when key aspects of your paper's Middle East coverage over the years is called "gutless," "cowardly" and "servile" [...].
[...]
Fisk does not exempt his own newspaper from complicity -- The Times of London, for which he was then reporting -- noting that it "was still able to carry a photograph in March 1985 of an Iranian soldier in a London hospital covered in terrible skin blisters, with a caption saying only that he was suffering from 'burns which Iran says [sic] were caused by chemical weapons.'" Nor does he heap blanket scorn on The New York Times. He offers high praise (on page 326) for the paper's historical reportage of the Armenian genocide by the Turkish government during World War I. "From the start," he writes, "The New York Times distinguished itself with near daily coverage of the slaughter, rape, dispossession and extermination of the Armenians." And he details that coverage at length, giving it much credit for bringing the genocide to the world's attention.

By page 340, however, he's back on the case, accusing everyone from the Associated Press ("disgraceful") to the BBC ("contemptible standards") of caving in to "Turkey's powerful lobby groups," which "attack any journalist or academic who suggests that the Armenian genocide is fact."
[...]
But Fisk doesn't end there. "Another of [the reporter's] articles was headlined 'Armenia Never Forgets -- Maybe It Should,'" he writes, adding that he has "suspicions about all of this."

I think The New York Times's reporter produced this nonsense so as to avoid offending the present Turkish government.[...].
[...]
Ironically, the very reporter who comes in for Fisk's scathing criticism (and whose name we've chosen not to mention) has a story in today's Times, headlined "Courting Europe, Turkey Tries Some Soul-Cleansing," about Turkish willingness to take responsibility (or not) for the Armenian genocide. The paper would seem to be making amends, especially by running a horrific 1915 photo of the slaughter, above, with the caption: "Last Taboo Amid democratic reforms, Turks have been confronting their past, including the 1915 massacres of Armenians."
[...]

Note: Above are excerpts from the article. The full article appears here. Clarifications and comments by me are contained in {}. Deletions are marked by [...]. The bold emphasis is mine.