Assad on Russian state television on Wednesday. (Photo: Reuters)
Interviewed on Russian state television earlier this week, President Assad told his interviewer “They [the West] outplayed us… at the very beginning of the crisis—[with] invented stories.” He added, however, that this was ultimately irrelevant, because “the reality is what matters.”
As for his first claim that the media is a battlefield, President Assad said nothing about Syria’s own attempts to control it. If by “invented stories,” he was referring to the Western media’s reliance on sources from the Syrian opposition, much of this reliance stems from the decision by the Syrian government to exclude foreign reporters. Two highly-respected, experienced correspondents who died in Syria, Anthony Shadid and the British Marie Colvin, smuggled themselves into the country at their own risk, paying the ultimate price in the process.
Much of the outrage around the world at the violence in Syria has been generated by YouTube videos and Skype communication uploaded by dissidents within Syria, rather than the reporting of professional journalists, which might have been more impartial and sensitive to the context and nuances of the situation on the ground. This also ignores the fact that the reporting on the Syrian opposition by the Western media has by no means been uncritically positive. Most news services, for example the BBC, report that it is divided and fractious, and that many of the opposition’s claims cannot be verified.
The Syrian government itself has tried to manipulate the news agenda, announcing elections and reforms, and branded all of its opponents as “terrorists.” While it is true that the recent Syrian elections have been widely dismissed in the media as fraudulent, this has been acknowledged by experts on Syrian politics like Professor Joshua Landis, who described them as “the ruse that most thought they would be” on his blog.
President Assad’s other claim, that the “information war” is irrelevant, is probably true for the most part. Not, as he claims, because the Syrian people support his reform program and the situation on the ground is better than it is reported to be in the Western media, but because the real war is the one that is being fought in Syria itself. This is where the future of Syria will be decided. Assad still controls a sizeable military machine, and the opposition has proven to be resilient and unwilling to give up, despite being uncoordinated.
The US, amongst others, has given little indication that it intends to intervene to force a resolution on both sides, and Syria still has the support of Russia and China at the UN. The recent deadly car bombings in Damascus have made the situation murkier and more dangerous from the perspective of Western governments. An “information war” amongst spectators to the Syrian crisis will remain a sideshow while all of these factors remain unchanged.