员罗柏·费斯克

罗伯特‧费斯克（英语：Robert Fisk；1946年7月12日—2020年10月30日），来自英国肯特郡梅德斯通区，是英国报纸《独立报》的中东记者及作家，在黎巴嫩首都贝鲁特驻守了逾30年。

Robert William Fisk (12 July 1946 – 30 October 2020) was an English writer and journalist. He was critical of United States foreign policy in the Middle East, and the Israeli government's treatment of Palestinians.

As an international correspondent, he covered the civil wars in Lebanon, Algeria, and Syria, the Iran–Iraq conflict, the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Islamic revolution in Iran, Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, and the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. An Arabic speaker, he was among the few Western journalists to interview Osama bin Laden, which he did three times between 1993 and 1997.

Fisk began his journalistic career at the Newcastle Chronicle and then the Sunday Express. From there, he went to work for The Times as a correspondent in Northern Ireland, Portugal, and the Middle East; in the last role, he based himself in Beirut intermittently from 1976. After 1989, he worked for The Independent. Fisk received many British and international journalism awards, including the Press Awards Foreign Reporter of the Year seven times.

Fisk's books include The Point of No Return (1975), In Time of War (1985), Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War (1990), The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East (2005), and Syria: Descent Into the Abyss (2015).

The noun fisking (meaning a point-by-point rebuttal) and the related verb fisk were named after him.

Early life and education

Fisk was an only child, born in Maidstone, Kent, to William and Peggy Fisk. His father was Borough Treasurer at Maidstone Corporation and had fought in the First World War. His mother was an amateur painter who in later years became a Maidstone magistrate. At the end of the war Bill Fisk was punished for disobeying an order to execute another soldier; his son said, "My father's refusal to kill another man was the only thing he did in his life which I would also have done." Though his father said little about his part in the war, it fascinated his son. After his father's death, he discovered that he had been the scribe of his battalion's war diaries from August 1918.

Fisk was educated at Yardley Court, a preparatory school, then at Sutton Valence School and Lancaster University, where he undertook his B.A. in Latin and Linguistics and contributed to the student magazine John O'Gauntlet. He gained a PhD in political science from Trinity College Dublin in 1983; the title of his doctoral thesis was "A Condition of Limited Warfare: Éire's Neutrality and the Relationship between Dublin, Belfast and London, 1939–1945". It was published as In Time of War: Ireland, Ulster and the Price of Neutrality 1939-1945 (London: André Deutsch, 1983; reprinted in Dublin by Gill & MacMillan, 1996). Reviewer F. I. Magee in 1984 wrote: "This book presents a detailed and definitive account of Anglo-Irish relations during the Second World War....Fisk's excellent book highlights the ambivalence in relations between Britain, the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland and goes a long way towards explaining why the current situation is so intractable."

Career

Newspaper correspondent

Fisk worked on the Sunday Express diary column before a disagreement with the editor, John Junor, prompted a move to The Times. From 1972 to 1975, at the height of the Troubles, Fisk was the Times Belfast correspondent, before being posted to Portugal after the Carnation Revolution in 1974. He then was appointed Middle East correspondent (1976–1987). In addition to the Troubles and Portugal, he reported the Iranian revolution in 1979. When a story of his on Iran Air Flight 655 was spiked shortly after the paper's takeover by Rupert Murdoch, Fisk moved to The Independent in 1989. The New York Times called Fisk "probably the most famous foreign correspondent in Britain". The Economist called him "one of the most influential correspondents in the Middle East since the Second World War."