Reporting the Middle East

The Practice of News in the Twenty-First Century

Zahera Harb, Zahera Harb

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781786721761
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 21st Century History
• Index: History

How do the media cover the Middle East? Through a country-by-country approach, this book provides detailed analysis of the complexities of reporting from the Arab World. Each chapter provides an overview of a country, including the political context, relationships to international politics and the key elements relating to the place as covered in Western media. The authors explore how the media can be used to serve particular political agendas on both a regional and international level. They also consider the changes to the media landscape following the growth of digital and social media, showing how access to the media is no longer restricted to state or elite actors. By studying coverage of the Middle East from a whole range of news providers, this book shows how news formats and practices may be defined and shaped differently by different nations. It will be essential reading for scholars and practitioners of journalism, especially those focusing on the Arab World.

1

On the Afterlife of False Syria Reporting

Omar Al-Ghazzi

As of June 2015, more than 220,000 people are estimated to have lost their lives in the Syrian uprising and the ensuing civil war. Hundreds of thousands more have been injured. About half of Syria’s 23 million people are either internally displaced or living as refugees in other countries. Syrians have died under torture, by air bombings, including indiscriminate barrel bombs, in chemical weapons attacks, in suicide bombings and in sinking boats crossing the Mediterranean Sea. Ruled under the grip of the Baath Party since 1963 and the Al-Assad family since 1971, Syria in 2015 is considered one of the world’s biggest humanitarian hotspots and refugee crises. The suffering of Syrians is unfortunately very real. And their struggles deserve the urgent and continuous attention of global news media.

However, the coverage of the Syria story in the last five years has shed doubts on the relation between reality, truthfulness and news in remarkable ways. Since the initial protests in Syria in March 2011, the Syrian regime banned foreign journalists from working in the country in its attempt to control the mediation of the popular rebellion. The nature of the initial protest movement, which often deployed clandestine tactics in the planning of collective action, also made activists the only witnesses. Activists shot amateur digital videos showcasing protests and regime atrocities. Networks of local and diaspora curators administered the flow of digital photos and videos from activists across Syria to global media. Rebel groups eventually developed their own media arms. For its part, the Syrian regime sought to take advantage of this complexity to undermine all amateur digital videos, many of which show crimes against humanity.¹

In this chapter, I will discuss how false stories about Syria have reverberated across media contexts, particularly how they elicited reactions from official Syrian media that took advantage of them to defend and consolidate the position of the Al-Assad regime. I use contentious examples from the reporting of Syria, particularly those stories that turned out to be false. And I follow their afterlife and the ways they contributed to shaping the official Syrian media narrative. I highlight the importance of considering how news narratives, regardless of whether they are true or false, contribute to shaping events and influencing the choices of political players. While this is not a theoretical chapter, the empirical evidence it provides contributes to larger debates in journalism studies.

The politically significant reverberations of false Syria reports offer lessons that address the debate in journalism studies about the place of reality in the news. As Zelizer (2006) explains, while cultural studies approaches focus on the social construction of reality, emphasising that our understanding of the world is relative and mediated by various discourses, journalists treat facts, truth and reality as ‘god-terms’ in their profession, and use them as tropes to protect their privileged professional position to tell ‘real’ stories. My argument is that the recurrence of false reporting about Syria offers important lessons about how old discursive tropes mired in Orientalism and technological determinism are often intrinsic to news narratives. These pitfalls of contemporary journalism should not be dismissed as exceptional errors that have separated the news from reality. Rather, their discursive impact – their afterlife – should be recognised as part of our political reality, as it influences the choices of political players involved in Syria. The acknowledgement of this complexity is necessary, I argue, in order to enhance truth claims in news reporting. In what follows, I trace the pattern of reporting these false stories. In Anglo-American media, false stories were produced and often later dismissed as unrepresentative of journalistic norms. On Syrian official media, such stories served as a pillar of a strategy to cast doubt on media representations of the conflict and enable the dissemination of outlandish claims about a universal conspiracy against the country.

I focus on two contentious episodes in the Syria coverage. The first case is the ‘A Gay Girl in Damascus’ blog, which was a prominent news story in the summer of 2011. Purportedly written by a lesbian Syrian-American activist, who got arrested by the Syrian regime, the blog was later revealed to have been a fictional fabrication by a ‘straight man in Scotland’, US national Tom MacMaster (Kenner, 2011). The second case is known as the ‘Syrian Boy Hero’, a short video distributed online purportedly showing a Syrian boy escaping sniper bullets to rescue his sister. The video was shared by news media and was viewed 5 million times in a couple of days. It turned out to be a fictional video shot by a Norwegian filmmaker. Both cases were reported by news media, only to be retracted as false. These two examples, in addition to the emergence of what I refer to as the ‘spokes-witness’ media role in Syria, raise questions about photojournalistic authenticity and the slippage in the differentiation between activists and witnesses. They reveal how the Syria coverage of the past five years encompassed much of the challenges faced by contemporary journalism and its global flows.

A Gay Girl in Damascus

The ‘A Gay Girl in Damascus’ blog controversy is an important example of the problems of the Syria coverage. The fact that this news story about Syrian-American lesbian activist Amina Arraf is fictional does not mean that the reporting on her did not have ‘real’ impact on the discursive level and in the political world. The story of Amina reflected and reinforced broader cultural and political attitudes and beliefs, whether in Syria or in the West – not least about ‘Arab and Islamic sexuality’. It follows a trend for ‘transforming other people’s struggles into self-serving morality plays’ that leads to an ‘alarmingly casual attitude towards the distinction between truth and lies’ (O’Neil, 2011). The blog falls within the context of what Chouliaraki (2013) has called ‘ironic solidarity’ that explicitly situates the self at the heart of moral action and renders solidarity a ‘contingent ethics that no longer aspires to a reflexive engagement with the political conditions of human vulnerability’ (2013: 4). Rather, it exhibits an apathetic empathy with the suffering of others. The blog has also contributed to the Syrian regime’s strategy of casting doubt over the authenticity of the protest movement, particularly in regards to its dependence on online media.

In May 2011, about two months after the outbreak of protests in a southern Syrian city over the arrest and torture of teenagers, Western media began to report on an English-language blog purportedly written by a lesbian Syrian-American activist, Amina Arraf Al-Omari. The blog was being updated regularly with memoire-style entries. They ranged from sensual poems about lesbian sexuality to commentary about the uprising in Syria. The blog was hyped up by Western news media. For example, in a report on 6 May 2011, the Guardian’s Katherine Marsh, ‘a pseudonym for a journalist who lives in Damascus’, declared that Amina is ‘a heroine of the Syrian revolt’. Marsh added that Amina, ‘female, gay and half-American […] is capturing the imagination of the Syrian opposition with a blog that has shot to prominence as the protest movement struggles in the face of a brutal government crackdown’. Following the media attention, the blog gathered more followers and admirers, mostly from Western countries. On 6 June 2011, a post supposedly by Amina’s cousin announced that she had been arrested. ‘I have been on the telephone with both her parents and all that we can say right now is that she is missing. Her father is desperately trying to find out where she is and who has taken her,’ the update stated.

The alleged arrest immediately became a main story on global news media as it captured the world’s attention. Within a day, 15,000 people signed a petition on the Change.org website, calling on US authorities to work for the release of the blogger. The petition described Amina as a ‘Sunni Muslim and openly gay woman’ and ‘an international symbol of the pro-democratic political movement’ (Jacqueline M, 2011). Facebook groups and Twitter campaigns were also launched to rescue Amina. However, the blog and Amina’s story also began to invite scepticism over their authenticity. The US State Department declared that it cannot verify that Amina Arraf is indeed an American citizen. It also turned out that the photo the blog had been using for Amina has been stolen from a Facebook account of a Croatian woman living in London. The Electronic Intifada website took the lead in investigating the blog. On 12 June 2011, Electronic Intifada found that a US address in Georgia used by Amina matched a property belonging to Tom MacMaster, a forty-year-old American masters student at Edinburgh University. That, in addition to other clues, corroborated that MacMaster is the author of the blog. Confronted by the Washington Post, MacMaster first denied the allegations saying: ‘look, if I was the genius who had pulled this off, I would say, “Yeah,” and write a book’ (Flock and Bell, 2011).

However, on 12 June 2011, the blog was updated and MacMaster acknowledged his authorship identity. ‘While the narrative voıce may have been fictional, the facts on this blog are true and not misleading as to the situation on the ground,’ he stated. MacMaster added that he hoped attention is directed towards the people of the Middle East and their struggles in thıs year of revolutions as much as it has been paid to his blog. He continued:

The events there are being shaped by the people living them on a daily basis. I have only tried to illuminate them for a Western audience. This experience has sadly only confirmed my feelings regarding the often superficial coverage of the Middle East and the pervasiveness of new forms of liberal Orientalism.

Meanwhile, the Amina Arraf saga angered Middle East followers. Many pointed out that MacMaster’s blog did much harm. It lent credence to Syrian regime narratives that news media are fabricating stories about Syria, endangered LGBT Syrians and undermined bloggers and citizen journalists as news sources (McCay, 2011). Others pointed to the nerve that MacMaster, as a white American married man pretending to be a Syrian lesbian woman, had in saying that reactions to his blog exhibited liberal Orientalism (Leo, 2011). As Mikdashi and Moumneh (2011) pointed out, the Amina character was a honey trap for Western liberals – ‘the perfect half-white poster child of a brown revolution’. Indeed, Western media reports not only failed to question the blog’s authenticity but also falsely reported that the blog is popular in Syria, while in fact its followers, and the media attention that it received, largely emanated from Western countries.

My use of this case is to stress that larger cultural and political discourses are an intrinsic part of journalistic narratives. To begin with, there is the obvious issue that Western media attention has honed in on the blog simply because it is English-language, which as Lynch et al. (2014) have suggested, is a large and persistent problem in Western journalistic coverage and academic analysis of the Arab uprisings’ digital output. The contentious episode also exposes the privileging of a seemingly networked and technologically savvy individual as worthy of news media attention. As Bollmer (2012) argues, ‘disregarding the often tortuous negotiations of publicity and privacy necessary for the political action of marginal populations and identities, the demand to connect requires subjects to submit to a uniform ideal of openness’. Of course, the attention to this blog came within the context of the so-called Facebook and Twitter revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia. It is well known that the use of social media in political mobilisation against both countries’ authoritarian regimes in early 2011 has been hailed by Western and Arab commentators, many of whom argued that new technologies empower activists and support their democratic aspirations.

Perhaps the most prevalent dimension within the Amina Arraf news saga was in relation to how news media inadvertently propagated narratives about sexuality and the Middle East. The news reporting of this story demonstrated intellectual historian Joseph Massad’s (2007) Foucauldian critique of Western incitement to discourse about Arab sexuality as repressed and repressive. Most of the news reports about Amina lead with the ‘extra information’, meant to give background, that homosexuality is taboo in Syria. When Amina was supposedly abducted, it was reported that ‘an outspoken lesbian blogger in Syria, where homosexuality is illegal, was reportedly snatched off the streets’ (Sheridan, 2011). Another article explained that homosexuality in Syria is a ‘strict taboo’ and quoted from MacMaster’s blog in which his Amina character said ‘there are a lot more LGBT people here than one might think, even if we are less flamboyant than elsewhere’ (Marsh, 2011). Thus, while Western coverage was expressing outrage over the Syrian regime’s crackdown on activists, in this case a lesbian activist, it was also portraying the region as backward. While the language of news reports purports this information as if to contextualise news with a cultural background that already exists, it is also actually producing and renewing a discourse about the backwardness of the Arab world as evidenced by the region’s homophobia. As Mikdashi and Moumneh (2011) contend, the situation of Arab gays and women is portrayed as a marker for backwardness and civilisation under the twinned discourses of ‘tolerance’ and ‘Islamophobia’. Even when the inauthenticity of the Amina blog was exposed, Western news reports reached out to local gays and lesbians, who had voiced outrage over the Amina hoax, and presented their statements as authentic representations of sexual minorities. The implication in the news reports was that, though Amina is fictional, the homophobic culture is genuinely real.

MacMaster eventually issued an apology. In addition to betraying the trust of many people, he also voiced regret by saying: ‘I have distracted the world’s attention from important issues of real people in real places. I have potentially compromised the safety of real people’ (Leo, 2011). Major Western news media apologised and updated their erroneous news reports – pointing out the difficulty of reporting Syria given the regime ban on foreign reporters in the country. The ‘Free Amina Arraf’ petitions and Facebook groups were taken down. One of the campaigns’ slogans, a quote from the blog, ‘borders mean nothing when you have wings’, lost its allure of inspiration when its author was no longer the rebellious lesbian in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Author Bio
• Endorsement
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• List of Contributors
• Introduction: Reporting the Middle East, the Arab World and Islam
• 1 On the Afterlife of False Syria Reporting
• 2 First Framing and News: Lessons from Reporting Jordan in Crises
• 3 Reporting Egypt: A Framing Analysis of the Coverage of the 30 June Mass Protests and Beyond
• 4 Reporting Lebanon: Orientalism as News Practice
• 5 Reporting the Israel–Palestine Conflict
• 6 Reporting Pre-1948 Palestine in Brazil: The Journalistic Narrative and the British Empire
• 7 Limited Perspectives: Reporting Gaza
• 8 Stoning Iran: Strategic Narratives, Moral Authority and the Reporting of a Stoning Sentence
• 9 Reporting Turkey: Somewhere between the European Self and the Oriental Other
• 10 Covering Iraq: Observations of a Fixer and Journalist
• 11 Reflections and Observations on Covering the Middle East: Syria, Yemen and Saudi Arabia