The Listening Post

Syria: Battles fought, lives lost, lies told

We look back at a year of coverage of a war that has claimed the truth as one of its casualties.

In 2011, we ended the year with a special programme on the Arab revolutions. We looked at the coverage of those stories and the implications for other countries in the Middle East and beyond. Now the Arab Spring is a year older and on this programme we are rewinding our coverage of Syria to the beginning of 2012.

For the past 12 months we have tracked the coverage of the fighting – the casualty figures are all over the place: Estimates of those killed since the unrest began now range between 30,000 and 52,000 people and since the beginning of 2012, more than 30 media workers have lost their lives there.

With journalists thin on the ground, that information vacuum continues to be filled by citizen journalists and that means we have got used to that one key line delivered by the news anchor: “The authenticity of these images cannot be verified.”

And the information war being fought over Syria has divided many media outlets into two camps: pro- and anti-Assad. Pan-Arab channels have been accused of siding with the Free Syrian Army. That has given birth to new television channels such as Al Mayadeen TV out of Beirut launched by journalists disgruntled by the way the war has been covered by channels like Al Jazeera.

This week’s Listening Post special takes a chronological look at a year of battles fought, lives lost and lies told in a war that, as the cliché says, has claimed as one of its casualties, the truth.

We hope you enjoy the show.

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Listening Post can be seen each week at the following times GMT: Saturday: 0830, 1930; Sunday: 1430; Monday: 0430.

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