Propaganda war
affects coverage of Syrian
conflict Coverage of
Syria's civil war has been polarised by competing
narratives. Relying as we are on sources like
activists and opposition politicians, a more
moderate approach ought to have been adopted, but
instead news channels like Al-Jazeera Arabic have
adopted a decidedly opposition-friendly stance. By
KHADIJA PATEL.
The United
Nations and Arab League special envoy to Syria,
Kofi Annan was reported to be on his way to Qatar
on Sunday night after a second round of talks with
Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad in Damascus.
Annan had hoped to secure Assad’s favour
for a national political
dialogue between the government and the opposition
and also gain unfettered access for humanitarian
aid agencies into the restive region of Homs.
Assad is said to have rejected the
proposal of any political dialogue as long as
"terrorist" groups were trying to destabilise the
country. Syrian opposition groups meanwhile
dismissed the offer for dialogue so long as the
Syrian military continues its offensive in the
north of the country. Burhan Ghalioun, the head of
the factitious Syrian National Council, labelled
the calls for dialogue "naive".
As Annan
haggled with Assad and opposition groups, reports
indicated Syrian forces had not let up its
relentless shelling of the opposition strongholds
in Homs. In the north Syrian town of Idlib,
fighters from the Free Syrian Army were reported
to have been trying to hold back government troops
in fierce clashes. Sixteen rebel fighters, seven
soldiers and four civilians were killed in the
Idlib fighting, according to the Syrian
Observatory for Human Rights, which claimed 15
other people, including three soldiers, had been
killed in violence elsewhere. International media
coverage of Syria has depended on these reports.
The images of death and destruction in Homs has
proliferated on social media channels and formed
the backbone of mainstream media coverage on
Syria. The continued calls for an international
intervention in Syria has been built on reports
such as these.
Syrian state media however
offer a rather divergent take on the situation in
the country. The Syrian Arab News Agency (Sana)
reported on Sunday, "Two authorities' members
(sic) were martyred during a clash with armed
terrorist groups which have been committing
criminal acts against citizens and vandalizing
private and public properties in the
neighbourhoods of al-Jarajemeh and al-Sheikh Anbar
in Hama. A source in the province told a Sana
correspondent that the clash resulted in killing
and wounding a number of terrorists, in addition
to seizing amounts of machineguns and RPGs
launchers."
Meanwhile in Homs, Sana
reports a kidnapping of a member of Assad’s party.
"In Homs, an armed terrorist group kidnapped a
member of the Baath Arab Socialist Party branch in
Homs Mesbah Ahmad Al-Sha'ar and his driver at
Al-Ghouta area while they were heading for work."
In Aleppo, Syria’s second largest city, Sana
reports on the murder of a boxer, "An informed
source told Sana Correspondent that the armed
group targeted Boxer Tayfour while he was passing
near the courtyard of Aleppo University in his car
as they opened fire on him and he was immediately
martyred as five bullets entered his head."
These reports from Syrian state media are
ridiculed outside of the country, but within the
country, it continues to thrive as the primary
means of understanding the world for vast swathes
of the Syrian population. Within Syria, the
official state line still wields great clout.
Addressing Syrians, the Syrian state media seeks
to authenticate the legitimacy of Assad’s rule
against international efforts to discredit him.
Syrian TV has been especially busy exploring the
alleged international plot hatched by the likes of
Saudi Arabia and Qatar to enforce regime change in
Syria.
In addition to the daily street
fight for control over Syria in the country’s most
restive regions, there is a more insidious battle
for ascendancy in the battle of the narrative of
the Syrian uprising. As the civil war gathers more
momentum on the streets, the daily fight for
liberty and life is waged with equal ferocity in
the narrative of the uprising. Assad’s media
machine fights it out against a veritable army of
opposition activists who feed international media
outlets with snippets of life in a city under
siege, grainy videos and daily reports of
casualties. Given the lack of access to Syria to
international news organisations, these activists
have been crucial to providing an antithesis to
the account spun by the state-controlled media.
It has become accepted wisdom to distrust
Assad’s version of events but it has also become
standard practice to hail the opposition.
International media has been too ready and too
quick to adopt a "heroes vs villains" approach to
Syria. Coverage of Syria has been polarised by
competing narratives. Relying as we are on sources
like activists and opposition politicians, a more
moderate approach ought to have been adopted, but
instead news channels like Al-Jazeera Arabic have
adopted a decidedly opposition-friendly stance.
Al Jazeera Arabic's Beirut correspondent,
Ali Hashem, resigned on Tuesday after leaked
emails revealed his frustrations over the news
channel's coverage of Syria. The network’s server
had been hacked by the self-styled Syrian
Electronic Army, revealing discontent among some
of the network’s employees within the Arab news
channel over its coverage of Syria.
The
major find in the hack was an email exchange
between anchorwoman Rula Ibrahim and Hashem. In
conversation with her colleague in Beirut, Ibrahim
says she had "turned against the revolution" in
Syria after realising the protests would "destroy
the country and lead to a civil war". She went on
to deride the opposition Free Syrian Army as "a
branch of al-Qaeda".
While Al-Jazeera has
remained tight lipped on the breach of its server,
the state broadcaster in Syria lauded the
revelations in the email as proof of the
subversive role foreign proxies were playing in
sowing chaos in the country. When Hashem spoke to
Daily Maverick on Sunday evening, he blamed his
departure from the Qatari-owned network on a
politicisation of the news. "We are in the era of
a politicisation of media, that’s one of the
reasons why I left Al-Jazeera," he said. "Today
the owners want their agenda to be clear on the
news diary, they are paying money to make use of
their media outlet, I can't impose on them to
abide by media ethics, the best thing if you don't
like it leave it and so I did."
As’ad
AbuKhalil, Professor of political science at
California State University, writing in his blog
The Angry Arab News Service, is certain the slant
of Al-Jazeera’s reporting on Syria is an extension
of Qatari foreign policy. "I am not surprised of
the leak at all: I am in contact from people
inside Al-Jazeera who are disgusted by the
propaganda work of the network in the last few
months," he says. " The network has been so bad
that the law of diminishing returns apply here:
the network has gone too far in its propaganda
work that I can't see any effectiveness in what
they do. I know how those things work and they
know that I know," he insists. "The footage that
are (sic) being shown show staging of events of
calling a civilian an ‘officer’ in the Syrian
army, of faking injuries and feeding statements to
people before airtime, etc. Al-Jazeera seems to be
writing its own professional obituary," he
continues ominously. "I don't know how it can
really resurrect itself again. It is mortally
wounded. I know that there are people in the
network who are pained about what is happening but
royal orders are royal orders in the network and
no one dare to disobey. I am told that orders came
down to the effect that no half-position would be
tolerated and that categorical adoption of the
Qatari foreign policy on Syria is a job
requirement."
Hashem however points out
that Al-Jazeera has been as culpable as any other
news organisation in the Persian Gulf for
employing a virulently anti-Assad stance in the
way they’ve reported the story. "As a matter of
fact the Arab media is divided in way that even
this affects the audience who are dealing with
media outlets as if they are parties," he said.
"Politics is dominating the business and on both
sides of the landscape you can't really depend on
one channel to get your full news digest, it is as
if the audience are doing the journalists'
homework by going for their two sources by
themselves watching the two sides to get one piece
of news," he says of the role of social media in
the coverage of Syria. "It's not the issue of who
is saying lies and who is accurate, today’s media
organisations are giving their part of the story
that serves the agenda of their financier, so it's
clear that part of the truth is exposed while the
other part is buried."
In a region robbed
of the right to free speech, the kind of open
debate that inspired the success of the Al-Jazeera
Arabic news channel revolutionised the way Arab
people interacted with the daily political
spectacle. It was little wonder then that
Al-Jazeera was banned by so many of the region’s
dictatorial regimes. And while the network is
still vastly popular, the way in which the Syrian
uprising is being handled raises uncomfortable
questions about the network’s perceived
objectivity while retaining Qatari government
funding. "I believe all the credibility investment
during the past two decades went in vain, the
elite are once again dealing with Arab news
channels they why they used to do with Arab state
media, and are depending on western media to know
what's going on," Hashem says. "It’s not strange
that BBC Arabic channel gained an additional 10 to
15-million viewers during the last year at the
same time that leading Arab channels lost the same
amount or more in several countries (in the
region)."
Shoruk Khaddour, a 23-year-old
Syrian student, studying journalism at Brunel
University in West London, has travelled to Syria
twice since the uprising against Al-Assad began a
year ago. She believes the uprising that began in
the vein of the "Arab Spring" protests that took
the region by storm was hijacked by a fringe
opposition group who the international media has
failed to adequately scrutinise. "The media omits
and lies about the numbers and who exactly has
been killed by whom," she told Daily Maverick.
"During my time in Syria, both last summer
and recently, I found certain areas to be much
safer than what was being reported on the news.
And also found that some news wasn't being
reported at all. I have family in Homs but because
of the dangers of being killed not by the army but
by the armed terrorists, I could not enter the
city and visit them," she said. "We passed Tal
Kalakh, a supposed problem area but it was quiet
and peaceful and nothing was happening. Upon my
return to Damascus on my last days we saw soldiers
on the outskirts of Homs preparing to defend the
citizens of the city from the shootings of the
armed terrorists. ?Shootings into minority
neighbourhoods happen on a daily basis and I have
had relatives shot and kidnapped by these
‘peaceful freedom fighters’."
Jillian C.
York, Director of International Freedom of
Expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation,
writing in her personal blog, is careful to stress
that criticism of coverage of Syria does not
necessarily denote support for Assad. "I have
known and talked about the horrors of the regime
since long before March 2011. But while even 1,000
civilian deaths are far too many, these numbers
matter when they’re being used to justify
intervention," she says. "The media’s almost total
reliance upon activists – not simply citizens, but
self-described activists - is therefore
problematic. And yet, criticizing that fact has
become even more problematic. York bemoans the
lack of a more objective slant in international
reportage on Syria. "At the moment, you have what
is essentially a divide between journalists,
commentators, and media bureaus that are very
clearly pushing the opposition line and those that
appear to be shilling for the regime. And there’s
no middle ground - there's almost no one
condemning the regime, for example, whilst
simultaneously questioning the dominant opposition
narrative. Those who dare search for truth are
immediately labelled as being on one side or the
other," she says.
We know well that truth
is the first casualty of war but in the accounts
of what must certainly now pass for a civil war in
Syria, international media coverage - English and
Arabic and certainly not confined to the
Al-Jazeera network - has failed to scrutinise the
anti-Assad narrative emanating from Syria. Lest we
forget, this is an all-out propaganda war where
both sides have been ready to forego the truth to
win the right to tell the story the way they see
it. DM
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