Here is our old friend Robert Fisk showing what a great war reporter he is:

I’ve been increasingly discomfited by all these reporters in their blue space-suits, standing among and interviewing the victims of war, who have no such protection. I know that insurers insist correspondents and crews wear this stuff. But on the streets, a different impression emerges: that the lives of Western reporters are somehow more precious, more deserving, more inherently valuable than those of the "foreign" civilians who suffer around them. Several years ago, during a Beirut gun battle, I was asked to put on a flak jacket for a television interview by a journalist wearing one of these 12lb steel wrap-arounds. I declined. So no interview.

This is the same Robert Fisk who penned these now infamous lines about Saddam’s mighty unbatterable defences on the eve of the fall of Baghdad (may these lines never be forgotten):

The road to the front in central Iraq is a place of fast-moving vehicles, blazing Iraqi anti-aircraft guns, tanks and trucks hidden in palm groves, a train of armored vehicles bombed from the air and hundreds of artillery positions dug into revetments to defend the capital. Anyone who doubts that the Iraqi Army is prepared to defend its capital should take the highway south of Baghdad.

How, I kept asking myself, could the Americans batter their way through these defenses? For mile after mile they go on, slit trenches, ditches, earthen underground bunkers, palm groves of heavy artillery and truck loads of combat troops in battle fatigues and steel helmets. Not since the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War have I seen the Iraqi Army deployed like this; the Americans may say they are “degrading” the country’s defenses but there was little sign of that here Wednesday…

I had perhaps two hours to take it all in, to wonder how the Americans could batter their way up this long, hot highway — you can feel the temperature rising as you drive south — with its dug-in tanks and APCs and its endless waterlogged fields and palm plantations. The black-uniformed men of the Saddam Fedayeen with red and black “kuffiah” scarves rounds their heads, whom I saw a hundred miles south of Baghdad, were kitted out with ammunition pouches and rocket-propelled grenades. And they did not look to me like a “degraded” army on the verge of surrender.

Yes, there’s a lot to be said for war reporters knowing something about, you know, war. Rather like we expect football commentators to know a little about football?

My favourite war reporting story comes from Moscow and the attempted Communist coup against President Yeltsin in autumn 1993 which culminated in the attack on the White House (Russian Parliament building) whither the coup supporters had retreated.

A famous ITN reporter – even now I spare his blushes – wanted to show how dramatic the fighting was. So he arranged to film his breathless heroic story crouching down behind a low wall with the crackle of gunfire in the background. Dramatic indeed were the images filmed. Yet we never saw them! Why? Because the camera crew knew that he was a blustering phony and allowed the cameras to roll even though standing behind the wall were a young Russian couple happily chatting and watching the battle with no concern at all. He was furious when he saw the footage. Haha.

The point? That Robert Fisk has a point.

War reporting like all other sorts of media reporting is all too often packaged and frothed up to make the reporters themselves seem all-important. Sometimes the reporters indeed are important – and brave – enough to get stories which catch the attention of world opinion. Then they become part of the story and these days are likely to be targeted, as tragically happened to Marie Colvin and Remi Ochlik in Syria.