Robert Fisk, who worked as a foreign correspondent first for The Times and since 1989 for the Independent, had the most influence of any journalist on my career. But it wasn't because of his charismatic speech in 2010, or because of the many articles I had read that had influenced my understanding of the Middle East as a student. 

Fisk did not speak fluent Arabic, not even after living in the Middle East for more than 40 years

It was because learning for myself that Fisk was a fraud, a fabricator and a fantasist was fundamental to my understanding of the very concept of journalism, and the responsibility that this profession is supposed to carry. He was guilty of the same "propaganda campaigns" he accused the Western media of conducting.

The veneration of Fisk, in his obituaries and throughout his career, serve as an indictment of a British foreign press that continued to indulge a man who they knew was violating not just ethical boundaries, but also moral ones. In a way, the glowing obituaries, free from the constraints of the normal journalistic practice of fact-checking and evidence, were a fitting tribute to Fisk. Like him, they preferred to tell a story that was not true, because stories are often far more comforting than the reality. 

So let's separate the myths from the facts. Fisk did not speak fluent Arabic, not even after living in the Middle East for more than 40 years. Leaving aside the testimony of Arabic speakers who worked alongside him, his lack of basic knowledge of the language is contained multiple times within his own work, such as his inability to tell the difference between the words "mother" and "nation" in a well-known Ba'athist slogan.

Fisk's reputation among scholars and journalists in the Middle East was destroyed by years of distortions of the truth in his work on Syria. But even before he started embracing pro-Assad conspiracy theories, Fisk's relationship with the truth was widely scrutinised. It is a monumental absurdity that we have a word, "Fisking", in the Cambridge English Dictionary derived from his surname, without any mention of him. 

The frequency with which falsehoods can be found in Fisk's work wasn't so much an open secret as a widely shared joke

The dictionary defines it as "the act of making an argument seem wrong or stupid by showing the mistakes in each of its points, or an instance of doing this." The frequency with which falsehoods can be found in Fisk's work wasn't so much an open secret as a widely shared joke understood by all who worked in the industry.