(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
[7. April 2006] It does not matter if you confess to God or Allah. There are parts of the Christian Easter message you should take with you anyway. Logical love should logically make you a humanist, feminist and anti-racist. It's about justice and understanding for other people. And for us journalists: a reminder that all people's perspectives are an equal part of the truth.
The Skup conference for journalists had the weekend before Easter brought in Robert Fisk as keynote speaker. He is seen as a controversial journalist and representative of a so-called subjective method. This is because, for almost 30 years, the Independent Middle East correspondent goes outside the pack of journalists as he looks for material for his own affairs. He doesn't sit in the hotel room, and he doesn't travel with the US Army. Fish is traveling around with his Iraqi friends and talking to civilians in the streets. Thus his cases are interpreted as angular, subjective and controversial. Fish are often contrasted with the requirement of journalistic objectivity.
His lecture emphasized that it is the so-called objective journalism that prevents us from seeing the truth. It is not he, but the rest of the press, who follow set angles on their affairs. The requirement of objectivity is used to prevent us from going into depth and telling how individuals perceive the truth. We use the language of the rulers and describe the other's abuses in greater detail than our own. We let Allied soldiers decide where we are going and what we will see. Other angles rarely revolve around other stories, but whether we should look at our own actions from the right or the left.
Then Fisk finds his subjective sense of justice and looks at the West's actions from outside. He turns witty issues on his head, to find out if what we take for granted might be wrong. Fish talks to the man and woman in the street and conveys their perspectives. It is charity, that.
