The Western media: the propaganda wing of al-Qaeda?
by Brendan O’Neill, Spiked:
Western coverage of Aleppo has been disturbingly shallow and biased.
[…] The Western media coverage of Syria counts as some of the most biased, uncritical war reporting of recent times. A vastly complex war, referred to by one journalist in August as ‘the world’s most complicated cat’s cradle’, has in recent weeks been reduced to a simplistic, binary morality play, a clash of innocence and evil. The British media coverage of Aleppo in particular has focused heavily, and at times entirely, on the horrendous plight of civilians. Footage shows us civilians cowering in their homes, dashing through the streets to avoid Russian bombs, gathering in hospitals for news of loved ones. What’s missing is striking: images of the gunmen, an estimated 10,000 of them, huge numbers of whom are al-Nusra, who had made Eastern Aleppo one of their harsh, unforgiving strongholds. These militants would muddy the simplistic narrative of a Russian-led genocide against Syrian civilians, and so they’re simply redacted from what we see on the TV news: an act of omission that borders on censorship.
The end result is coverage that elevates emotionalism over analysis, feeling over fact, making readers weep over helping readers understand. And coverage which, in the process, ends up doing Islamists’ bidding. In the words of Patrick Cockburn of the Independent, Western news organisations are ‘being spoon-fed by Syrian jihadists and their sympathisers who make it impossible for independent observers to visit areas they control’. Given that it’s too dangerous for Western journalists to go to Eastern Aleppo, the media have become reliant on anti-Assad and anti-Russia activists to provide them with information and heartrending footage. But of course, these activists are only permitted to do and say certain things, given they live in areas controlled by ‘some of the most violent and merciless movements on Earth’, in Cockburn’s words. The consequence? ‘There’s more propaganda than news coming out of Aleppo’, as Cockburn says.
Read also:Amid the bombs of Aleppo, all you can hear are the lies by Peter Hitchens, Mailonline
Watch: Canadian journalist explaining how the mainstream media is not telling the truth about Syria.