Syrian Newspapers Emerge to Fill Out War Reporting

The tall tales and outright misinformation that tainted so much reporting from Syria convinced him that more objective coverage was essential to bolster the effort to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad.

Too often, he said, he could not believe what passed for news on popular satellite channels, like the Qatari-owned Al Jazeera and the Saudi-run Al Arabiya, both staunch opposition supporters. The two channels relied heavily on unfiltered reports from local activists hired as correspondents, or, failing that, grabbed whatever they found posted on Facebook to report as news, he said.

When Mr. Smesem’s hometown, Binnish, in northern Syria, was under siege by the Syrian Army, he said, one activist-cum-correspondent used the local expression “Dabahoona dbah,” which in Arabic literally means “We are being slaughtered” — but which the people of northern Syria use to mean “We cannot breathe.”

Within minutes, a breaking-news headline scrolled across the television screen saying Syrian government forces were committing a massacre in Binnish.

“There are no objective sources of information on either side, neither with the regime nor the rebels,” said Mr. Smesem, 46, a veteran reporter with graying hair and an easy laugh. He told the story over a late-night cup of tea in a cafe in this southern Turkish city, a nerve center for Syrians struggling to shape their future state even as the gory civil war drags into its third year.

“We need to get out of this Facebook phase, where all we do is whine and complain about the regime,” he said.

Mr. Smesem said he believed that the rampant exaggeration harmed the cause of the rebellion. “When the regime simply denied the news, and they were right, that gave the regime more credibility,” he said.

For media analysts, coverage of the Syrian war has seriously eroded the reputations of channels like Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya. Where their newscasts once brought a measure of objectivity to a region dominated by servile state-run media, they are increasingly viewed as mouthpieces for the foreign policy objectives of Qatar and Saudi Arabia.

“The major pan-Arab networks have lost a great deal of credibility on the Syria story,” said Marc Lynch, director of the Middle East studies program at George Washington University.

Mr. Lynch said the change was particularly striking for Al Jazeera, once considered must-see TV during any Middle East crisis. “Al Jazeera has lost its ability to be the neutral ground where Arabs who disagree about things can argue,” he said.

It was in the spirit of objectivity that Mr. Smesem’s newspaper, Sham, another name for Syria in Arabic, began publishing in February. It was one of several publications introduced at roughly the same time.

The Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, an opposition group stronger in exile than it is domestically, just began publishing its newspaper, Al-Ahd, or The Vow. The initial edition took a “we told you so” attitude toward the level of violence fomented by the government; the Brotherhood was evidently trying to address its checkered reputation within Syria for being partly responsible for the mini-civil war that erupted around 1980.

Another weekly paper, Free Syria, published in nearby Gaziantep, Turkey, shares an ideological viewpoint with the Sham weekly by endorsing pluralism, moderate Islam and democracy. At least one large military brigade is publishing its own paper, called Brigades, which has been raising questions about the origins of extremist Muslim fighters.

Numerous Muslim extremist groups, including the Nusra Front, or Jabhet al-Nusra, tend to print short pamphlets to spread their ideas, like attacks on anything that smacks of a civil state.

“We as Muslims have rebelled against all values of the infidel Western society,” said one pamphlet, called The Caliphate, published in the small town of Al-Sahhara in northern Syria. “So how can we kick secularism out the door while opening the window to accept it under a new form and a new name, a civil state?”

Hala Droubi contributed reporting from Antakya, and Sebnem Arsu from Gaziantep, Turkey.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/02/world/middleeast/syrian-newspapers-emerge-to-fill-out-war-reporting.html?partner=rss&emc=rss