Cultural Writing. Middle Eastern Studies. Journalism Studies. In the audio collection WAR, JOURNALISM, AND THE MIDDLE EAST, author Robert Fisk--"The most famous foreign correspondent in Britain."--New York Times, recounts the rize of Hezbollah, his interviews with Osama bin Laden, and the growing Iraqi insurgency, drawing from his experiences of unparalleled access to history-makers in the region. This collection arrives on the heels of his recent treatise on the Middle East, The Great War for Civilization, and includes a lecture and an interview with acclaimed radio host David Barsamian. Fisk is a Beirut-based correspondent for The Independent UK. Total running time of the disc is 76 minutes.

The New York Times once described Robert Fisk as "probably the most famous foreign correspondent in Britain."He reported the Northern Ireland troubles in the 1970s, the Portuguese Revolution in 1974, the Lebanese Civil War, the Iranian revolution in 1979, the Soviet war in Afghanistan, the Iran-Iraq War, the Gulf War and the invasion of Iraq in 2003. A vernacular Arabic speaker, he is one of few Western journalists to have interviewed Osama bin Laden, three times between 1994 and 1997. Awards include being voted International Journalist of the Year seven times. Fisk has said that journalism must, "challenge authority, all authority, especially so when governments and politicians take us to war." He has quoted with approval the Israeli journalist Amira Hass: "There is a misconception that journalists can be objective ... What journalism is really about is to monitor power and the centres of power." He has written at length on how much of contemporary conflict has its origin, in his view, in lines drawn on maps: "After the allied victory of 1918, at the end of my father's war, the victors divided up the lands of their former enemies. In the space of just seventeen months, they created the borders of Northern Ireland, Yugoslavia and most of the Middle East. And I have spent my entire career - in Belfast and Sarajevo, in Beirut and Baghdad - watching the people within those borders burn.