Fisking

The eponymous journalist Robert Fisk (pictured in 2005)

The term fisking is blogosphere slang describing a point-by-point criticism that highlights perceived errors, or disputes the analysis in a statement, article, or essay.

Eric S. Raymond, in the Jargon File, defined the term as:

A point-by-point refutation of a blog entry or (especially) news story. A really stylish fisking is witty, logical, sarcastic and ruthlessly factual; flaming or handwaving is considered poor form.

Overview

Named after Robert Fisk, a British journalist and author who writes on the Middle East, the term was employed in 2001 by various American conservative and libertarian bloggers who reposted Fisk's dispatches on their own blogs, along with paragraph-by-paragraph commentary that challenged, countered, and/or mocked Fisk's viewpoints.

A fisking is characteristically an incisive and fierce point-by-point rebuttal, and the aim is generally to weaken the target's credibility rather than seek common ground. The British newspaper The Observer defined fisking as "the practice of savaging an argument and scattering the tattered remnants to the four corners of the internet (named after Robert Fisk of the Independent)"

Software engineering writer Joel Spolsky finds a precedent for fisking in the "line-by-line nitpick" reply style common on Usenet, saying "political bloggers, newcomers to the Internet, have reinvented this technique, thinking they were discovering something fun and new"

As for Fisk himself, in a 2005 interview he stated that he was unaware of the term. "I have to be honest: I don't use the Internet. I've never seen a blog in my life. I don't even use email, I don't waste my time with this. I am not interested. I couldn't care less. I think the Internet has become a hate machine for a lot of people and I want nothing to do with it."

Origin

"Fisking" was coined by bloggers in December 2001, following a three-paragraph response by Andrew Sullivan to an article Fisk wrote for The Independent on Sunday earlier that month. In the piece, Fisk recounted a beating which he received at the hands of Afghan refugees in Pakistan and said that, given their experiences, he could understand why, as a westerner, they had treated him that way and that, in their position, he would have behaved similarly. Sullivan quoted and responded to passages from the Fisk piece, but not in a complete, line-by-line format. He described Fisk's excusal of his attackers as a form of left-wing racism. The term fisking was first applied soon after on Instapundit and Sullivan's blog.

Comparisons and distinctions

Fisking can be compared to the Usenet style of responding to an argument's specific points by quoting lines prefixed with the ">" character (which contrasts with the style often found in e-mail of top-posting a reply, all in one piece).

Fisking is different from flaming, with which it is sometimes confused. Fisking is not verbal abuse, although it may contain a degree of derision and scorn.

Fisking is similar to the line-by-line method in policy debate, where one debater addresses each point of an argument in turn, as opposed to addressing the entire thesis of his or her opponent, the purpose being to demonstrate that the underlying foundation is poorly constructed, so the resulting edifice of reasoning cannot be trusted.

This interlinear technique is found in Talmudic analysis and commentary, as well as in Rashi. The most famous medieval precursor to modern-day fisking may be The Incoherence of the Incoherence by the Muslim philosopher Ibn Rushd (Averroes), which is a paragraph-by-paragraph reply to and rebuttal of Al-Ghazali's (Algazel) equally famous The Incoherence of the Philosophers.