Syrian media: Before and after the revolution
The Syrian mediascape has been altered forever. The Syrian uprising is certainly the most documented conflict in recent history and has likely set a new dynamic — media wise — for any future revolution. The situation in many parts of the country, such as in eastern Ghouta and Idlib, is terrible, as the regime and its supporters perpetrate war crimes and crimes against humanity on a daily basis. The work of the new media organisations is indispensable for shedding light on the atrocities happening on the ground and will be vital for those who are committed to stopping this genocide, seeking justice and prosecuting those responsible for it.
Dictatorship and information control
Before the outbreak of demonstrations in March 2011, the Syrian regime exerted almost absolute control over the media. After a short period of relative freedom of internet use, in 2007, in the wake of the movement known as the Damascus Spring, the government banned platforms like Facebook and YouTube. Moreover, television channels, radio stations and print newspapers, both public and private, were always linked to political power.
This tight informational control in Syria was even more stringent than in other countries in the region, such as Egypt or Tunisia, where internet access by broad sections of society was more widespread. In these two countries, bloggers and digital activists experienced some degree of freedom, whereas in Syria, freedom of expression was hard to come by. This was due to the highly authoritarian nature of the regime established in 1970, known as a ‘kingdom of silence.’
As Emily Hawthorne explains in Statfor, then-Defence Minister Hafez al-Assad, the father of current leader Bashar al-Assad, established himself as president following a bloodless coup in 1970: “He handed out key positions to his close allies, creating a circle of loyal followers to ensure control even in a relatively decentralized system. The new president forged relationships with members of the Baath party and the business elite, making them dependent enough upon him to render the presidency indispensable to the survival of the whole system.”
Since the beginning of the 2000s, the Syrian regime under Bashar al-Assad opened the telecommunications and press sectors to private capital under a law known as Decree 50. However, far from representing political liberalisation, Decree 50 opened a highly lucrative market to friends and allies of the regime, in which regimes allies lined their pockets at the expense of genuine press freedom.
As Leah Caldwell explains: “ More than a year after coming to power, President Bashar al-Asad issued Decree 50, which overturned a 1963 revolutionary decree outlawing privately owned publications. While Decree 50 is often rosily credited with reforming the Syrian mediascape, it actually instituted more restrictions on publishers and journalists than ever before.”
Among these restrictions were “forcing journalists to reveal their sources, as well as imposing fines and jail terms for journalists or publishers who disobey the guidelines or publish without a license.”
Wikileaks revelations about the operation of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) in many cities around the world, where the agency wiretaps people from all walks of life, both prominent politicians — such as Angela Merkel — and regular citizens, show that the control of information and the media by governments is standard in most countries today.
Even in liberal democracies where freedom of expression is protected under law, and to some degree exercised by civil society, the close ties between political power and the media are not a secret. This relationship is realised through financial means, such as public investment in private media organisations, and political influence, such as the use of politicians’ influence to determine the source and nature of information leaked to the press.
Nevertheless, dictatorial regimes convert these mechanisms of information control and espionage against ordinary citizens into one of the fundamental pillars of their modus operandi, forging a tense legitimacy in which information and propaganda are not distinguished from each other.
Pre-2011, the regime’s secret service, the dreaded mukhabarat, was comprised of about 200,000 people, with both government officials and civilians working as spies (though civilians were, in many cases, forced). The apparatus of espionage and wiretaps put into operation served to detect any type of activity considered seditious or subversive.
The role of the mukhabarat was so prominent that it actually exerted a pronounced influence in various other matters of the state. As Andrew Rathmell describes, “the term ‘mukhabarat state’ is often used rather loosely in relation to the contemporary Arab world to refer to the nature of authoritarian state power in much of the region.” He continues:
“Assad’s Syria provides a prime example of such a state. From independence until the mid-1960s, the intelligence services were an essential element in the struggle for power. In particular, control of the Deuxième Bureau was highly prized as it enabled the faction that controlled it to persecute its opponents with the full panoply of summary arrests and military tribunals.”
The approval of Decree 50 generated great expectations among Syrians and in the international community, who hoped that the recently-appointed President Bashar al-Assad would play the role of a democratiser after the death of his father.
Nonetheless, as in other areas of the economy privatised during the younger Assad’s presidency, the liberalisation of the telecommunications sector, meaning its partial privatisation, hardly altered the information deficit and lack of freedom of expression in the country.
The state news agency, SANA (Syrian Arab News Agency), founded in 1965, is one of the most powerful and influential propaganda outlets in the country. According to its website, SANA publishes more than 500 news articles daily, in a variety of languages.
Its mission is “the adoption of Syria’s national firm stances and its support to the Arab and Islamic causes and the principles of justice and right with the aim of presenting the real civilised image of Syria.” This translates to SANA referring to the opposition as ‘terrorists’ in its articles, combined with an ‘anti-Western’ attitude, which places it in the same political camp of Russia and Iran. The news agency functions as an accurate reproduction of Bashar al-Assad’s political discourse.
The Arab Spring changes the Syrian mediascape
Before 2011, there were innumerable dissidents arrested for circulating newspapers with editorial lines contrary to the regime’s official discourse.
2011, though, marked a turning point for Syrian media, especially in regard to the use of social networks, as well as the emergence of new media groups and citizen journalism. As Antoun Issa notes, “Syria’s media culture is undergoing significant transformation from a top-down, state-run industry, to a diverse arena populated by competing viewpoints and driven by communities.”
The emergence of these new media groups takes place not only in the context of a very powerful popular uprising, but also within a cultural-artistic explosion that has spread throughout the country and the Syrian diaspora. This cultural revolution has seen poetry, music, graffiti, theatre, journalism and literature flourish.
The Syrian revolution, especially in its earliest stage, was characterised by peaceful protests that did not aim to overthrow the Assad regime, but to reform it economically and politically. Samar Yazbek, writer and Syrian dissident, explains the beginnings of the protests in her book, ‘A Woman in the Crossfire: Diaries of the Syrian Revolution’:
“Every city began with the same demands, and when the security forces and the ‘shabbiha’ started arresting and killing people, the protest movement started changing and simple quality-of-life issues were transformed into a single demand: the fall of the regime.”
Today, the number of newspapers, websites and Facebook pages informing us about events on the ground in Syria is impossible to count. Regardless of what occurs in the future, its seems that the Syrian mediascape will never return to the regime-controlled one of the past.
Antoun Issa estimates that, in 2016, almost 315 newspapers were in circulation in different parts of the country, the vast majority of which were in opposition to the regime. On the other hand, there were 17 recorded newspapers that followed the regime’s political stance.
The rapid establishment of a multitude of outlets led by citizen journalists was a product of necessity, as such journalists analysed and disseminated information that was not made public either inside or outside of Syria. The media blockade imposed by the regime, compounded by the international media’s unwillingness to send correspondents to Syria, was behind the emergence of this great — and, in a way, unique — movement of citizen journalism.
In the beginning of this movement, media coverage faced the following difficulties as noted by Antoun Issa:
1) the lack of trustworthy, professional independent media on the ground in Syria that could be depended upon to document and verify events, and report them at a high professional standard; 2) the lack of impartial coverage due to the confluence of political activism and citizen journalism; and 3) a lack of basic reporting skills, ranging from writing to technical broadcast skills.
While international media was present in Syria at the beginning of the revolution, the majority of the few international journalists based in the country departed when the conflict became militarised. Since then, most international news organisations began to rely on the information produced by Syrian activists and citizen journalists.
After the militarisation of the revolution, the few international journalists who have been authorised by the regime to enter the country have had to abide by severe regulations which limit their access to areas controlled by militias loyal to the regime. Moreover, such journalists are put under permanent surveillance by government officials.
Due to these restrictions on international journalists, citizen journalists were (and still are) the most effective way to get fresh news on what is actually taking place in different parts of the country. Leila Nachawati notes that Syria became the “largest producer of videos in the region”:
“In 2011, after the start of the popular uprising, Syria went from an informative black hole for decades to becoming the largest producer of videos in the region and one of the largest in the world. ‘YouTube’ came to change its rules, which hindered the dissemination of violent content, to adapt them to the historical need to tell what was happening within the country. Hundreds of videos showing the determination of the protesters and the crudeness of repression by Assad’s forces were published on the platform every day.”
This ‘media revolution’ occurred within the broader context of the emergence of Local Coordinating Committees (LCCs), which are spontaneously formed assemblies that first played the role of organising protests. They gradually assumed various other functions, such as defending the demonstrations from regime snipers, organising garbage collection in the liberated areas and the administration of hospitals and schools, and producing news media. As Doreen Khoury explains:
“The Syrian grassroots civilian opposition has been the primary engine of the popular uprising against the regime of Bashar Assad. Local arrangements for self-organization have evolved from so-called local coordination committees (LCCs), which are mainly involved in media work and the organization of protests. They have created sophisticated structures of civilian administration in the liberated areas of Syria.”
As mentioned before, videos of the protests were posted on Facebook and Twitter, as in Tunisia and Egypt. At first, the protests were called on Fridays after prayer in the mosques, which were one of the few public spaces where political issues were freely discussed. Later the movement had to come up with different, innovative techniques to evade regime repression. According to an article published in the BBC:
“The Facebook page of ‘Syrian Revolution 2011’, with its 120,000 followers, called on people to take to the streets for Friday protests. It said they have no excuse not to join now that the barrier of fear has fallen.”
Citizen journalism in Syria
One of the issues faced by these thousands of anonymous journalist-activists, who risked their lives daily in order to produce information not filtered by state agencies, was the lack of technical and theoretical tools needed to produce quality journalism. On the one hand, they had benefited from the worldwide expansion of Internet access, which served as an important platform to learn to produce and disseminate information to a broader and overseas audience. On the other, many did not have the basic knowledge or training to carry out this activity.
The story of the Syrian journalist Zaina Erhaim, coordinator of the Institute of War and Peace Reporting and co-founder of an LCC in Syria, helps to elucidate the issue. The journalist, currently based in London, was completing a MA in Journalism in England when the Syrian revolution erupted and, from that moment on, she connected with various citizen journalists and activists in order to help them report professionally and according to certain standards. Erhaim has won several awards for her contribution to freedom of expression and to ethical, quality journalism. According to LinkTV, she has trained more than 100 citizen journalists and directly supported the establishment of various independent media outlets in Syria.
One of Erhaim’s most interesting projects is a series of short films, Syria’s Rebellious Women, about women who played a role of great responsibility during the uprising, taking up positions usually occupied by men. Such documentaries play an important role in portraying the participation of women in the conflict. Otherwise, this part of history would be forgotten, since unfortunately it is mostly men who are quoted and mentioned by media organisations and other institutions that forge a narrative about the ongoing conflict in Syria.
Additionally, some prominent Western media outlets, such as Deutsche Welle, have sponsored training programmes for Syrian journalists with the aim of instructing the young people who had become their primary sources. This support by international media, however, has been very limited in relation to the immense needs of the media groups in Syria and the enormous power of the pro-regime agencies and propaganda apparatus.
Hadi al-Manjid, a citizen journalist born in the city of Deir al-Asafir, in the outskirts of Damascus, describes his experience practicing as a journalist in the Damascene suburb of Eastern Ghouta, an area which has been ruthlessly besieged by the Syrian regime for almost five years:
“Eastern Ghouta was in need of journalists to convey images of demonstrations and the crimes being committed by the regime and its Shabeeha, so a few friends and I decided to form a coordinating committee in Deir al-Asafir, and speak to the media under the name Abu Fouad al-Ghoutani. After a few days, the regime discovered what I was doing, and burned down my house. This prompted me to leave for Jordan, fearing for the lives of my family, but my love for the revolution prompted me to return to Eastern Ghouta a few months later, to keep up with the revolutionaries’ victories. I appeared on video on several Arab TV channels, as a witness to the revolutionary battalions’ victories and the crimes committed by the regime.”
His testimony is representative of the early years of the revolution, when the situation had not yet deteriorated to the absurd levels of violence facing the country now. It is regrettable that, after years of siege and isolation, secular groups have lost prominence in favour of fundamentalist factions supported by countries such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey.
These are just some of the independent Syrian media outlets that are available today.
Enab Baladi
Enab Baladi, which means ‘the grapes of my country,’ was founded in January 2012 and is predominantly run by women. They have been publishing weekly since the founding of the newspaper, with only one interruption of two weeks during the Daraya massacre, when which their office was destroyed by the Syrian army.
Shams News Network
Shams New Network is a network of media organisations specialised in transmitting the facts of the Syrian revolution and news of various topics.
Syrian Free Press
Syrian Free Press is a group of activists gathered under a very simple objective: transmitting the voice of the Syrian people to the world. It was founded on February 19, 2011, as a support for the Syrian people’s uprising and freedom of expression in Syria, with only two journalists, but has since grown to include many more.
Souria Houria
Souria Houria is an association with the goal of working towards democracy, fundamental freedoms and human rights. It was founded in May 2011 by Syrian residents in France, along with French citizens. The association supports the Syrian people in their demand for freedom, dignity and social justice. Its objectives are to end the dictatorial and criminal regime and to work towards the advent of democracy in Syria, based on the rule of law, equality for all citizens and respect for human rights.
