Syria and the Media

By Noah Carvajal

I have been following the situation in Syria, where a possible civil-war is looming in the midst of a struggling attempt at revolution against a dictatorial regime, with interest and revulsion. However, I realized that I saw no mention of it in most newspapers lying around the Sixth Form Common Room or the headlines and papers I glance at and read over shoulders on the tube to school. In fact, after a little research I discovered that among the major newspapers of this country only The Guardian and The Times published a major article on the situation.

After a flurry of media articles in November, not much is being said. The Daily Mail, The Telegraph, The Metro, and perhaps unsurprisingly The Sun were just a few of the many newspapers that, I noticed, failed to mention the continuing situation in Syria under the reign of Bashar al-Assad, at least anywhere near the front page spread. Comparing this event to the very recent and much publicised uprising in Libya, I find it strange that, this time around, it doesn’t seem like a story that the popular press are very interested in. It leads me to wonder, what’s happening this time around that makes it such an uninteresting story? In Syria there is mass torture of people aged from ten to eighty by Assad’s secret police force, Mukhabarat. There are unbelievable levels of government oppression and propaganda. The Syrian military’s tanks are firing into unarmed crowds of protesters. Literally tens of thousands of unconfirmed pieces of footage of atrocities carried out by the regime, mostly taken on mobile phones, have arrived on the internet. Yet the popular media in the UK have remained singularly disinterested.

This is not an argument of whether intervention is the morally right action to take or not, but it is my view in to what I think is a worrying state of affairs. Despite international condemnations from countries such as the US and Canada, who both imposed sanction on Assad’s regime, and from the Arab League itself, many ordinary people don’t seem to be aware of the situation. The basic humanitarian drive that pushed the Libyan revolution to the fore of the public consciousness seems to be lacking. The media do not report, the readers of the media are not made aware, and the story fades into the background, at best relegated into the ‘World’ section of a newspaper’s webpage. It’s not as if the story isn’t newsworthy, and I don’t understand how the papers don’t seem to want to report on it. I believe that it is their mission to educate, hopefully objectively, and create a public awareness of subjects that should be known. The plight of the Syrians suffering horribly under Assad seems to have gone unnoticed. Without media support aid is scarce, and countries are not pledging themselves to the cause. In November, Simon Collis, the British ambassador to Syria, said, “The international spotlight and...the international community...are aware of what is happening.” Now, I’m really not so sure.

(A documentary on Channel Four on 19 December, 11.10pm, called ‘Syria’s Torture Machine,’ is probably well worth watching.)