They’re lying to you about Aleppo: How the mainstream media is spreading propaganda
Written by H. & Me
In the recent days, news about Aleppo has been capturing our screens. We hear things like: “The people of Aleppo are being massacred.” “There is a genocide.” “Let this not be Sbreneca.” Celebrities have come out in protest. US Ambassador Samantha Power asked the UN representatives of Russia & Iran if they have no shame. Heart-wrenching ‘last messages’ of people from East Aleppo are flooding social media. The ceasefire in Aleppo has been likened to ethnic cleansing. Hundreds of thousands of people around the world have took to the streets to protest and ask their governments to step in. Even the Eiffel tower went dark in solidarity with the people of Aleppo.
Who would not be moved by such tragedy? But what if we told you that what you have been reading was just part of the story?
Before we go on, let us be clear. We are not denying the existence of horrors in the Syrian war, and we accept no party is innocent. But the issue we want to address is the fact that the dominant media narrative playing out in the West doesn’t allow for any complexity and is dramatically one-sided about just who is carrying out these horrors.
What you are seeing on mainstream outlets like CNN, BBC, Al Jazeera and more is a stunning oversimplification of a conflict that simply cannot be separated into “good guys” and “bad guys”. We are writing this post to explain why that’s not a story you should believe and to encourage you to be more discerning in your consumption — and sharing — of news related to this crisis.
The fact is, when it comes to Syria, most of the news is incorrect, incomplete and in some cases, it has been fabricated.
See these pictures. Even accounts from the ground can be politically motivated. For example: The tear-jerking ‘last messages’ from East Aleppo are from activists who have supported the rebels and are in sharing their perspective. On the other hand, the activists there won’t report stories from people who fled from East Aleppo under fire or how the rebels were hoarding food aid for themselves, and you will hear no condemnation of the burning of buses.
You have to compare accounts for the same incident from different sides of the political and geographical space. Recently, the Syrian UN Ambassador Bashar AL Jaafari showed a picture of Iraq as Syria at the UN meeting. Whether this was a mistake or deliberate — the fact that people who knew Iraq saw it meant it got caught. Just like that, mainstream news is being actively debunked by people on the ground. You probably heard rebels are protecting and providing for citizens in East Aleppo. Here’s an interview of a family that escaped and recounts the horror, and here’s another one about how the rebels were hoarding aid as civilians starved. Or that one of the sad faces you saw leaving a last message is not an independent journalist from East Aleppo but someone who has worked with al-Qaeda: Bilal Abdul Karim. This drew sharp criticism from many Arab reporters.
It’s hard not to believe people when they are seen broadcasting their last messages on Twitter. There is no question these people are suffering but what the media is not telling you is that the source of that suffering is not that simple.
We’ll discuss this in more detail below but for a complete list, click here.
So what’s the mainstream narrative, and why is it wrong?
Current mainstream media supports the Western narrative, supported by the Gulf states: Syrian Army, Russia, Iran and now Hezbollah are gunning down civilians, decapitating children across the country all to uphold Syrian government. They’re the ‘bad guys’. For people in the West, this is easy to believe. Russia is run by oligarchs. Iran is the enemy of US, is sanctioned and has a oppressive regime. Hezbollah is the enemy of Israel and hated throughout Europe. So this makes for a great axis of evil, right?
The ‘good guys’ are the rebels supported by the West, Turkey and the Gulf states. These ones are protecting civilians, giving jobs and empowering women. (Note that these rebels don’t “invade” territory in Syria, they “win” it.) The West is democratic, doesn’t force women to cover up, has economic prosperity and stands for ‘human rights’. So whoever they support must be good, right? Forget that Turkey has struck a deal with Europe to keep refugees off shore in return for money and other privileges. The problems with Gulf states and Saudi Arabia are not new to anyone yet they are not seen as ‘bad guys’ in this instance because they are allies of the West. Anywhere else in the world, the defeat of Al-Qaeda would be seen as a good thing but in Aleppo, magazine such as The Economist called it the ‘fall of Aleppo’. The fact that US, Germany, France and UK have been supplying Saudi Arabia with weapons which they use to kill people in Yemen is never part of this discussion.
Forget the fact that both the so called ‘good guys and ‘bad guys’ are also fighting Daesh/ISIS. The reality of who is fighting who and why in Syria is more complex than you can imagine. See this BBC visualisation for more details.
But what about all those videos on the news of residents desperate to flee east Aleppo at the hands of the government forces? Aren’t those true? How can we deny that suffering on-screen?
Have you wondered why all of these action and coverage centre around the narratives of people on East Aleppo? Have you heard about rebels hitting civilians in government-held areas? Have you heard about people in East Aleppo being relieved to be in government controlled areas? How many times have you heard ‘the last hospital’ or ‘the last doctor’ in Aleppo has been demolished?
If you have only met refugees who tell you horrible stories about the regime, you’re only hearing one side of the situation.
We’re not defending the actions of the military or the government where they have violated the rights of people but you can only compare that to other wars. But you cannot compare what’s happening in Syria to Denmark. You can compare it to Iraq. A lot of Syrians left the country in fear of not the government forces, but of Al Qaeda, ISIS and the Western-backed rebels. Some of them run away just because they saw the war was going to ravage the country so they fled to safety.
In recent weeks, this media hysteria around the atrocities in east Aleppo has people drawing comparisons to WW2, or the massacre in Srebrenica. These analogies are not helpful and are inaccurate. From what they have heard about one side of one city in Syria is now the dominant narrative for the whole war and the absolute truth: Assad is a monster, emboldened by Russia and Iran who is hated by all civilians.
This narrative has no comprehension of the geo-political space and proxy wars unfolding in the region, and is only being understood with a Western lens (it’s about democracy, religion, ethnicity etc).
For a more detailed list of the misconceptions, lies, and half truths — as well as a competing list of things we do know, see our explanatory list (with lots of links) here.
You may wonder why is this happening? Are the media purposely deceiving us? Or are they just dumb?
There are many reasons, but one of the biggest has to do with structural problems with the way media has worked in covering the Syrian conflict. However, there are some voices of reason in main stream media who are speaking out about this bias. For an explanation of that, we defer to Stephen Kinzer, a senior fellow at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University, writing in the Boston Globe.
“Under intense financial pressure, most American newspapers, magazines, and broadcast networks have drastically reduced their corps of foreign correspondents. Much important news about the world now comes from reporters based in Washington. In that environment, access and credibility depend on acceptance of official paradigms. Reporters who cover Syria check with the Pentagon, the State Department, the White House, and think tank “experts.” After a spin on that soiled carousel, they feel they have covered all sides of the story. This form of stenography produces the pabulum that passes for news about Syria….Astonishingly brave correspondents in the war zone, including Americans, seek to counteract Washington-based reporting. [But] reporting from the ground is often overwhelmed by the Washington consensus.
And here’s some more context from Patrick Cockburn writing in the Independent:
“There is nothing wrong or surprising about the Syrian opposition demonising its enemies and hiding negative news about itself. The Iraqi opposition did the same thing in 2003 and the Libyan opposition in 2011. What is much more culpable is the way in which the Western media has allowed itself to become a conduit for propaganda for one side in this savage conflict. They have done so by rebranding it as authentic partisan information they cannot check, produced by people living under the authority of jihadi movements that tortures or kills any critic or dissenter.
News organisations have ended up being spoon-fed by jihadis and their sympathisers who make it impossible for independent observers to visit areas they control. By regurgitating information from such tainted sources, the media gives al-Qaeda type groups every incentive to go on killing and abducting journalists in order to create and benefit from a news vacuum they can fill themselves.”
Patrick Cockburn, The Independent, Dec 2016
And here’s another one from Robert Fisk:
But it’s time to tell the other truth: that many of the “rebels” whom we in the West have been supporting — and which our preposterous Prime Minister Theresa May indirectly blessed when she grovelled to the Gulf head-choppers last week — are among the cruellest and most ruthless of fighters in the Middle East. And while we have been tut-tutting at the frightfulness of Isis during the siege of Mosul (an event all too similar to Aleppo, although you wouldn’t think so from reading our narrative of the story), we have been willfully ignoring the behaviour of the rebels of Aleppo. Robert Fisk, The Independent
So what can you do?
You may not have friends on the ground or even if you do, there is no way for you to be there to verify news. However, the power to share or not to share, the power to question is still firmly in your hands. Stop sharing news stories from publications — even ones you trust — unless you do some research.
Don’t look at the conflict from your own perspective — your own lens. Be open to accept other opinions, other narratives and don’t draw comparisons to Europe. The point is to be responsible with what you share. Do your research.
See who owns the media networks you support. Dig into the vested interest of the countries that support particular news channels. See this investigative report by the Guardian on how Britain essentially funds a press office for opposition fighters and this report by The Independent about the US government spent over $500m on fake Al-Qaeda propaganda videos that tracked location of viewers. Reports and news like this from mainstream media give us hope but there is a long way to go before we clean up the world of inaccurate news.
If what you’ve read so far has made you even a little bit aware of this bias, then you’re probably looking for other sources of news. Here are some people who we’ve been reading, who are writing about the other side of the story — the side you’ve not heard so far. We might not agree with everything they write, but they’ve been a breath of fresh air and an alternative perspective which is lacking: Al Masdar news, Robert Fisk, Patrick Cockburn, Boston Globe, Edwark Dark, Lina Arabi, Eva Bartlett, Leith Abou Fadel, Partisan Girl, Sara Hussein, Rania Khalek, Creative Syria, Care for Syrians, Syria:Complete The story,and Camille Alexandre Otrakji.
So what do we know? Why did we write this?
We’re two friends. One of us grew up in Aleppo and the other in Pakistan. Both of us know what it feels like to be a minority in a country that’s strife with conflict. Now we both live in the UK, and are experiencing how the worldview of people is driven by the media and western bias. It has become abundantly clear to us in recent days that most of our well-intended friends only know what the mainstream media is telling them to believe, and they believe it without doing any research. What’s been shocking for us is how people who have been working on the refugee crisis, continue to perpetuate lies unknowingly.
One day, when Syria is at peace and happy and Aleppo is back to being the economic capital of the country, we will look back and see the coverage of the war as the most biased and propaganda-ridden campaign of our time. There will be theses written about how media can become complicit in political war and how social media leads can warp the truth.
The real hero in this conflict are the citizens of Aleppo who persevered for 5 years as war ate into their city, fractured their communities and yet they challenge death everyday while the media uses their misery for propaganda. These people will rebuild their communities. We wrote this in reverence to them.
In solidarity.
H & D
To see the list of evidence we have compiled, click here.
We would like to thank to our friends R, W, N for checking this post and helping put our emotions into words.
