The Listening Post

Syria: Journalism under duress

The media war in Syria is putting truth under pressure. And, Tunisian media’s obsession with terrorism.

The civil war in Syria has proven to be one of the most difficult and deadliest conflicts in the world for journalists to cover. So when a video – allegedly showing a Syrian boy rescuing a little girl while under gunfire – turned out to be a hoax, there was a vociferous backlash against the Norwegian filmmakers who produced it.

Journalists were at the forefront of the condemnation, accusing the filmmakers of belittling the work of professionals who risk their lives trying to report the truth and suffering of the real victims in the country. Adding to the confusion is the increasingly bizarre propaganda campaign by the armed group known as ISIL where kidnapped journalists are being forced to report for their captors.

Talking us through the Syria story this week are: Lina Khatib, director of Carnegie Middle Eastern Institute; Donatella Della Ratta, PhD fellow at Copenhagen University; Nevine Mabro, foreign editor, Channel 4 News; Sherif Mansour, MENA program coordinator at the Committee to Protect Journalists; and Scott Edwards, project manager for the Science for Human Rights project at Amnesty International.

Other media stories on our radar this week: The Russian presidential library announced that it will create an online resource to rival the perceived bias on the open-source encyclopaedia, Wikipedia; Thai TV host Nattaya Wawweerakup has been forced off the air by the ruling military junta for interviewing Thais critical of the new government; publishing giant Conde Nast has agreed to pay $5.8m to more than 7,000 former interns who sued the company, accusing it of denying them minimum wage.

This week’s feature: Under the regime of former Tunisian President Ben Ali, journalists were told how, what and when to report on issues of national security. Today, with the country’s new-found media freedom, that is no longer the case but analysts say that the amount of coverage dedicated to national security issues – headlined terrorism – has become disproportionate. Are Tunisians really in the kind of danger that their media suggest or are news outlets just trying to sell papers and drive up ratings in the new commercially driven market? The Listening Post‘s Nic Muirhead reports from Tunis.

Our closing video this week: It turns out that it is not all work on the International Space Station although some technical language can make it appear that way. The American space agency NASA described its recent video as an exploration of the phenomenon of water surface tension in microgravity. In other words, three astronauts managed submerge a sealed GoPro camera into a floating bubble of water and film the entire thing, from the inside and the outside. It turns out underwater footage in Space is popular back on earth as the video has racked up more than 2 million hits on Youtube.

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