Matters of Opinion: The Sacking of Octavia Nasr

Where does opinion start and objectivity stop in the labours of a journalist? If we want investigative scribblers who are incapable of meshing value judgments with the material they come across, they might as well give the game up. There is, quite simply, no such thing. That said, the illusionists of the trade would insist on it, and the sacking of Octavia Nasr, who was CNN’s main editor for its Middle East coverage over a Twitter post, is another example of it.

According to the ‘tweet’, Nasr was, ‘Sad to hear of the passing of Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah… One of Hezbollah’s giants I respect a lot.’ Fadlallah, a somewhat complex creature, had been formidable figure of the Lebanese Shiites, initially enthusiastic about the use of suicide bombings against Israeli targets in Lebanon and Palestine. The worm did turn, however, when he criticized Hezbollah’s ties with Iran and the ‘rule of the clerics’ (velayet-e faqih) which enshrined the theocratic base of that state. Political observers were puzzled by the cleric, uncomfortable about his anti-U.S. position just as they were perplexed by his seemingly progressive stance against female circumcision and honour killings.

The Anti-Defamation League was not having a bar of it. Subtle readings of character are not usually part of its assessment. A terrorist so designated by the U.S. authorities is a terrorist in all his purity, and should hardly be ‘praised’ by a journalist. Fadlallah ‘disseminated numerous fatawa’ supporting terrorist operations and was a vocal supporter of terrorism against Israeli targets’. For a CNN journalist to ‘express such a partisan viewpoint as Ms. Nasr did in her tweet’ was ‘clearly an impropriety’. That her history betrayed no evidence of anti-Israeli or pro-Palestinian bias mattered little. Heads had to roll.

When does such ‘impropriety’ manifest itself? The best journalism often strays into emotive territory, which is hardly surprising, given its status as ‘literature in a hurry’. Sometimes, it can be a blatant reproduction of the party line, a naked mouthing in the form of a Will Duranty piece on the Soviet Union. The state delves out, the journalist simply rehashes for public consumption. What matters in these situations is the principle of fairness. As long as that is recognized, pieces can have an astonishing flavour – the personal reflection wedded to unearthed facts can be formidable.

The BBC reporter segment From Our Own Correspondent does occasionally betray its own ‘biases’ (call it that, call it anything else) – and personal reflections should be, within a certain compass, tolerated. Besides, critics of the swift CNN decision, such as Glenn Greenwald at Salon, pointed the finger at former AIPAC official Wolf Blitzer, the network’s star anchor for over fifteen years, as ripe for similar treatment. The only conclusion, one is compelled to reach, is that one tweet was something of a roar to an establishment particularly uncomfortable with empathetic remarks of any kind towards ‘terrorists’. Indeed, the Nasr case is far from unusual.

The use of Twitter and such instantaneous communications also makes the ease of letting ‘opinion’ out greater. A tweet, by its very nature, encourages personal reflection, however well informed. In this case, it was hardly a matter of journalistic excess at all, but a mere personal impression by someone who so happened to be a journalist. That one can be dismissed for erasing the illusion of the ‘objective’ reporter by a mere few lines should be distressing to wordsmiths in the business.

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne and is currently in San Francisco. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com

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