Padre Paolo D’Oglio wrote that, “Rulers only resort to media misinformation when the people begin to emerge—if only superficially—as a social will within the historical process. Prior to this there is no misinformation in the precise meaning of the term. Rather, we find universal oppression, since there is no need to mislead the persecuted when they are submerged up to their ears in the misery of reality.”
Shahinaz is a nine-year-old girl from Homs. She begs from travellers at a campsite near Tripoli. She says her people came there from Al Bayada at the start of the war. The girl goes into no detail about the nature of this war. Her tribe, a Bedouin tribe from al- Bayada that have a different understanding of events from the one broadcast on the satellite television channels that either support or oppose the Syrian regime.
In the seventeenth month of the Syrian uprising, we can all agree as well as Shahinaz with no shred of doubt that what is taking place on Syrian soil is a war: two armed and politicized groups fighting over influence and territory. Battles here, assassinations there. Moreover, Syria has become a battleground for regional disputes, for settling scores, for penetration by certain extremist groups.
The description above is perfectly suited for newspaper copy, for the headlines of a news broadcast, but on closer inspection it turns out to be an incomplete portrayal of a movement that over the past year and half has evolved to produce different truths in different contexts. It also ignores the media’s impact on events on the ground, its role in presenting varying and contradictory representations of what is happening in Syria; representations that make up a complex and troubled part of Syrians’ collective and individual awareness of their new reality.
We shall not be claiming that this is no more than a media-driven revolution. That would be an insult to the more than twenty thousand Syrians who have given their lives in the noblest and most praiseworthy of causes. Nor can we ignore the fact that the media has grown larger than the revolution itself, swelling and expanding until it has become something totally divorced from the revolution, even as it continues to operate in its name, though in truth it does so to further different political interests, pushing events towards ever greater militarization and violence.
The citizen who does not know is better than the one who does
Learning from past experience the Syrian regime looked hard at the errors committed by other regimes in the region that had capitulated in the face of popular protests that imposed a new political reality known as the Arab Spring. In addition to the use of excessive violence and its shrewd exploitation of Syria’s sensitive geo-political location, the regime deliberately shut the door on Arab and international media outlets. This allowed it to doctor accounts of events, helping it to buy more time and engage in open media warfare with its enemies, muddying the distinction between right and wrong. This came as no surprise given the regime’s media-security mindset, which deployed ambiguity and obscurity over the most trivial of issues in obedience to the principle that the citizen who does not know is better than the one who does.
Approximately three years ago, when former Prime Minister Adel Safar was minister of agriculture and agrarian reform, a drought struck Syria’s Eastern Plateau region (Jazira). The government showed no interest in the farmers’ plight and approximately three hundred thousand of them relocated to the outskirts of Damascus, setting up encampments and receiving aid from the United Nations. All of this took place without 80 per cent of the population being aware that anything had happened.
Even the ruling family’s most devoted loyalists never followed the media until March last year, not just because the media had no credibility, but because news reports were almost entirely superficial and absurd accounts of the president’s latest movements or events in Palestine, a subject that must be ready to be evoked at any time.
The government-owned media: from shock to mischief
At first the government media seemed stunned and confused, existing in a state of permanent denial. There were no demonstrations, no demands from the street: it was all a conspiracy to undermine Syria’s patriotic stance on Palestine and its support of the Palestinian resistance. There were utterly bizarre attempts to claim we were watching Hollywood-like staged scenes and photo-shopped images of imaginary cities. The response to this approach varied depending on the awareness of the individual viewer, or rather, the capability of the listener to accept certain truths, given the complex set of sectarian and interest-based calculations at work in each individual. Some regime loyalists genuinely believed that the bombardment of Homs was rigged up by a state-of-the-art computer program. Though some of these individuals might suffer a crisis of conscience when trying to justify the regime’s behaviour, which in turn could affect their false perception of reality, the vast majority give their full support to the regime.
The regime has taken Goebbel’s famous quote as their guiding light, determined to lie and lie again until it becomes the truth. It persisted in its state of denial, despite the peaceful nature of the protests in the first six months of the uprising. It continued to assert that armed gangs were firing unprovoked on the army and civilians even though it could not come up with a single piece of evidence for the existence of these gangs (with the exception of three or four staged video clips that it played on loop every day). That was then. Now, they have hundreds of documents to prove to their supporters and those still on the fence that the patriotic Syrian media was right from the outset: that the conspiracy is real. Any credibility it enjoys may be fraudulent—it certainly has a complex and detailed history—but what is certain is that from the very beginning the regime used its media to insist that the protest movement was destined to become militarized, while working hard to deny the revolutionaries weapons and justify its own use of arms by vilely slandering its opponents.
It was in March, too, that the Syrian media (on behalf of the regime) represented itself as taking a side in a regional conflict, against a conspiracy being hatched against Syria. At first it seemed a little muddled, attempting to unpick the threads of the conspiracy with patently inadequate proofs, chiefly because events on the ground did not support its story. The idea it wanted to communicate to its loyalist audience was ready and waiting, but the means of communicating it were not yet available, so it released a series of documents more in the nature of mischievous jokes than anything else (i.e. Bandar Bin Sultan’s “plan” etc.) then made do with denying the existence of events on the ground and opening the airwaves to loyalists to insult the Gulf nations and proclaim their undying loyalty to their leader. These programs, hard to place in traditional media categories, can at best be described as laughable.
The Al Beyda village scandal
The video from the village of al-Bayada near Baniyas was the Syrian media’s first real scandal, with government outlets claiming that it was filmed in Iraq and that the troops involved were Peshmerga fighters and not Syrian security forces. The very next day a young man by the name of Ahmed al-Bayazi appeared in a new clip, clutching his ID card, standing in the very spot where soldiers danced on the bodies of villagers and stating that he was one of those who had been tortured. The Syrian state media responded by denying the existence of villager by that name and then, two months later, the same man appeared on state TV to deny the claims of “media agitators” that he had been liquidated in jail.
How loyalists are influenced by the regime’s media
Today, Syrian satellite channels seem different, more focussed. Their confusion is less evident and they utilize two contradictory and implicit sectarian discourses, one aimed at an internal audience and another, more “classical” discourse, directed abroad.
The first of these is designed to frighten. It is aimed at minorities with the intention of scaring them and winning their loyalty. It includes grainy footage of bodies killed in terrorist attacks and the occasional list of the names of dead soldiers in news reports (though the state media only reports on the deaths of a tiny number of soldiers).
The second discourse is reassuring. It states that the authorities have “cleaned up” and that order and security will be restored in a matter of days. It reviews the achievements of the armed forces in their pursuit of armed terrorist groups and their operations to purge them from the provinces. It showcases non-Syrians stating that the regime is in the right. All this, to make loyalists feel that they are not alone: that the world outside is evenly divided into friends and enemies.
At the current time, loyalists might view state media as poorly equipped and underfunded, but it is nevertheless a patriotic service, reporting the truth and exposing the lies and conspiracies of the Gulf-owned media. It has news reports containing patriotic songs praising the armed forces and debate shows with political analysts and media figures loyal to the regime. There are even risible investigative shows exposing the lies and fabrications of the Arab satellite channels. Footage of demonstrations taken from Arab satellite channels is followed by a stern presenter who assures the audience that these events are not taking place in Syria, without presenting any evidence to back up his claim. These shows in particular have gained a wide following in loyalist circles, partly due to the many errors in reports by Western and Arab media outlets resulting from the dearth of foreign correspondents on the ground in Syria and their consequent reliance on unverified videos and eye-witness accounts.
In addition, the regime’s media seeks to divide the population and set them at each other’s throats. Patriotism is defined as loyalty to Bashar Al Assad: everything else is treason. It airs forced confessions from certain individuals that they practiced terrorism against the population and now repent. Nevertheless, the overwhelming majority of those calling for removal of the regime continue to mock its efforts on social media sites. This is because it is a laughable and unprofessional service with no credibility. It shows no respect for Syrians’ intelligence nor for their lives. Indeed, many regard it as sharing responsibility for the murder of Syrians and call on those in charge to be held to account.
The opposition media
On the other side of the equation, the Syria people have managed to convince Arab and Western media outlets that the uprising is a popular revolution, like its counterparts in other Arab states, against a repressive and autocratic regime.
Qatar in particular rushed to absorb the shock of the Arab Spring and tried to appropriate it so as to benefit from its outcomes and keep its terrifying spectre from encroaching on the kingdoms of the Gulf. Saudi Arabia, however, remained hesitant, especially over Syria, initially providing support to Al Assad in the hope that he could resolve the crisis as soon as possible. The Saudis soon realised that they had backed the wrong horse and that a victorious revolution could provide additional Sunni support in its regional conflict with Iran.
However the drawn-out nature of the conflict in Syria, which has generated millions of hours of footage and column inches over the past year and a half, has turned it into a daily staple around whose edges turn the wheels of economic news, political bickering and debt-settling. It is a staple that reduces the Syrian situation to urgent news bulletins, whose sheer quantity overwhelms attempts to engage in any profound analysis of its political importance, robbing the revolution of its central values, granting ever greater space to marginal issues and causing a steady decline in professional journalistic standards (i.e. an unthinking bias in favour of the revolution) due to the lack of reporting teams on the ground. This media sprawl is partly due to the failure of the revolution to achieve a speedy conclusion as in Tunisia and Egypt. In Syria, multiple readings and terminologies have sprung up in tandem with outside attempts to politicize the situation and a conflict over the future of the country, which itself has become almost impossible to predict.
Social networking sites
The street’s view of the media swung back and forth as the Syrian crisis grew ever more intractable. As the need for a peek inside Syria’s black box grew ever stronger, demonstrators began hunting for some means of representing an alternative vision of what was happening on the ground to counter the official media’s narrative.
Their first solution was social networking sites. The official site of the Syrian revolution on Facebook gave names to the different Friday demonstrations and uploaded videos taken at demonstrations around the country. Next came mobile phones and contributions by amateur, on-the-ground “correspondents”, who coordinated with the Arab satellite channels to inaugurate what is now thought of as the “revolutionary media”, an industry with its own opposition stars, each contracted to appear on this channel or that.
This individualistic, fractured approach to media presentation is characteristic of a revolution which has no centralized leadership, and makes it easier to assemble different reports on internet forums to give a more holistic and convincing picture of events. However, a lack of professional standards and the ease with which faked videos and reports can be uploaded onto the Internet mean that the satellite channels broadcast a great deal of incorrect information, first misleading the viewer then rendering him permanently sceptical of everything he sees.
Correspondents in Syria
With the recent introduction of television crews and correspondents into Syria, the only thing that has changed is that the grainy, distorted footage from mobile phones has been replaced with much sharper footage from high-quality cameras. The foreign correspondents followed the home-grown amateurs in only covering bombardments and massacres perpetrated by the regime, remaining careful not to show the viewer anything that might discredit the Free Army or the revolutionaries.
The Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya channels, and to a lesser extent the other satellite outlets, have provided the revolutionaries with a window to the world. Even their severest critics from the Syria opposition are forced to admit that were it not for them, thousands more massacres and atrocities could have been committed by the regime without anyone being aware, not unlike the Hama massacre of the early 1980s that was only written about years later and even then hardly at all.
We have all seen the many signs and placards thanking Qatar, Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya (and even a few personally thanking the Gulf rulers) for supporting the Syrian revolution. The Syrian people, who emerged from tyranny’s cave into the sunlight, had no Syrian institutions to speak in their name, no channels through which they could express their goals and ambitions. They saw no shame in allying with other powers in the region in order to reach their objective of toppling the regime, yet this alliance was by no means an equal one. The media concentrated on what it saw as important, giving prominence to those it saw as representing the uprising and ignoring anything that did not further the interests of various political forces abroad. The politicization and manipulation of the news coverage evolved into outright invention, such as the recent focussing, by Al Arabiya in particular, on the arming of the uprising, which privileged the militarized aspects of the revolution over the unarmed, civil components of the struggle that are still active on the ground.
It is common knowledge that, in theory at least, the function of the media is to convert events into a news format that can be streamed into consumers’ homes, and that there should be a near-absolute congruity between the two (event and news bulletin) with perhaps a small margin for error. Prior to the Arab Spring the viewer was aware of variations or differences between an event and the news that reached him, but such incongruities were easily rectified by consulting a wide range of news outlets. Nowadays, these news bulletins have a built-in and highly unprofessional bias. The media is divided among competing political narratives against the backdrop of an unprecedented polarization of Arab and international news outlets.
Conclusion
In the end, we are forced to admit that non-Syrian satellite channels have a built-in bias, praising revolutions even as they are accused of “conspiracy”. Even so they manage to preserve, if only superficially, a degree of objectivity in presenting different points of view.
In the Syrian-run media the presenter is forced to intervene in the debate and the guest’s responses (the guest always being a regime loyalist) to ensure it stays on message and prevent it crossing any red lines. For instance, if the guest were to say that there are some problems in Syria, the presenter will inevitably chime in with, “Of course, at the level of implementation, not the leadership…” As a consequence most Syrians, even those most loyal to the regime, will follow satellite channels like Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya to find out what is happening on the ground.
Between young Shahinaz’s understanding of events in Syria and that of the satellite channels, whether pro-regime or foreign, it can seem as if we are discussing different countries where quite different events are taking place. At the same time, the instinctive preference for a more objective media source seems to necessarily entail support for the Syrian revolution. They might not be perfect narratives, but the pro-revolution narrative is closer to reality than the fabrications and fantasy of the regime’s media.