Media Lens - Mass Media Siege : Comparing Coverage Of Mosul and Aleppo

/852-mass-media-siege-comparing-coverage

  • Media Lens - Mass Media Siege: Comparing Coverage Of Mosul and Aleppo
    http://www.medialens.org/index.php/alerts/alert-archive/2017/852-mass-media-siege-comparing-coverage-of-mosul-and-aleppo.html

    When Russian and Syrian forces were bombarding ’rebel’-held East Aleppo last year, newspapers and television screens were full of anguished reporting about the plight of civilians killed, injured, trapped, traumatised or desperately fleeing. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Russian leader Vladimir Putin, both Official Enemies, were denounced and demonised, in accordance with the usual propaganda script. One piece in the Evening Standard described Assad as a ’monster’ and a Boris Johnson column in the Telegraph referred to both Putin and Assad as ’the Devil’.

    As the respected veteran reporter Patrick Cockburn put it:

    ’The partisan reporting of the siege of East Aleppo presented it as a battle between good and evil: The Lord of the Rings, with Assad and Putin as Saruman and Sauron.’

    This, he said, was ’the nadir of Western media coverage of the wars in Iraq and Syria.’ Media reporting focused laser-like on ’Last calls (or messages or tweets) from Aleppo’. There were heart-breaking accounts of families, children, elderly people, all caught up in dreadful conditions that could be pinned on the ’brutal’ Assad and his ’regime’; endless photographs depicting grief and suffering that tore at one’s psyche.

    By contrast, there was little of this evident in media coverage as the Iraqi city of Mosul, with a population of around one million, was being pulverised by the US-led ’coalition’ from 2015; particularly since the massive assault launched last October to ’liberate’ the city from ISIS, with ’victory’ declared a few days ago. Most pointedly, western media coverage has not, of course, demonised the US for inflicting mass death and suffering.

    As Cockburn pointed out, there were ’many similarities between the sieges of Mosul and East Aleppo, but they were reported very differently’.