Covering the Syrian conflict: How Middle East reporters deal with challenging situations

Situation: Restricted physical access

One of the most elementary ways in which political actors in the Middle East attempt to steer media coverage is by restricting journalists’ access to parts of their territories. While much has been written on the sophisticated press releases, linguistic subtleties and forceful images designed to lead journalists in a particular direction (Tumber and Webster, 2006; Wolfsfeld, 1997), it is these ultimately physical barriers that prevent even the most critical of journalists to ‘see for themselves’ what is going on, or to include diverging perspectives by ‘talking to the locals’. In Syria, more specifically, the problem was that journalists could enter the country either through the official channels by successfully applying for a government-approved visa, or through rebel-held areas. Journalists who entered rebel-held areas without permission from the Syrian government were from then on considered to be collaborators and would no longer be granted an official visa. Far from being an isolated case, one reporter remarked that ‘one of the cardinal sins you can commit, in the eyes of the Syrian government, was going into a rebel-held area, illegally as they see it’ (original emphasis). It should be noted that the Syrian regime has at its disposal a notoriously ubiquitous and professional body of secret agents, the so-called Mukharabat, assisted by the ‘Ministry for Information’. According to the reporters participating in this research, both organizations are substantially more professional than, say, Egypt’s or Iraq’s intelligence services ever were. This became evident when the Syrian intelligence services tracked down the remaining foreign journalists on its territory in the first few months after the start of the uprisings – in a period when absolutely no foreign media were allowed into the country. Three of the reporters I talked to were living in Syria at the time, and were either denied access when trying to return to the country, or were arrested and evicted for ‘illegal practices’ – compare this to Egypt’s rather clumsy response of taking journalists to court.

On the other hand, journalists who had first entered the country by means of an official visa in some cases faced scepticism and distrust from rebel groups when trying to enter the country under their guidance. This attitude can be partly explained by the Syrian state television’s creative use of foreign journalists’ work. Three broadcast journalists, for instance, claimed to be aware that their images had been used at least at one point by the Syrian state broadcaster’s main news channels, albeit with voice-overs added to their images. In addition to their work being used for propaganda purposes, this proved worrying for journalists’ physical safety as they had to rely on either side of the parties for their trust and protection.

Strategies

Some media organizations responded to these physical barriers by working out a division of labour among their journalists. At least two public service news or current affairs programmes thus had one journalist entering Syria now and then through the official channels, whereas the other occasionally entered rebel-held areas. In both cases, the idea for this set-up emerged rather organically, that is, without being consciously planned in advance. This policy simply resulted from one of the journalists being unable to acquire an official visa after entering rebel-held areas, which led the editors to decide that, from then on, the other journalist would enter the country only through the official channels. Syrian intelligence services thus seemed to exclude individual journalists, rather than media organizations – something that can be recognized with the BBC’s Paul Wood and Lyse Doucet. Presumably, the intelligence services saw no reason to exclude journalists covering Syria from the good side of the land: at least in theory, their coverage would still be influenced.

By opting for this division of labour, the editors seemed to put high value on covering a broader range of perspectives, places and peoples – a problem that was often criticized by media scholars working on the Iraq war (Boyd-Barrett, 2004; Couldry and Downey, 2004). More concretely, the labour division established for these two programmes was designed to ensure a long-term presence in the region, allowing them to produce news reports and analyses rather frequently as both journalists developed more sustainable contacts and networks within rebel groups and the Syrian state, respectively. As scholars have noted, these trust relations are especially crucial to war correspondents as they negotiate their autonomy through informal as much as through formal relations (Hannerz, 2004; Murrell, 2009; Palmer and Fontan, 2007).

In spite of its practical advantages, however, this strategy led to the professional frustration of the individual journalists involved, who felt prevented from acquiring a fuller perspective. As one of them recalled:

For me, that’s very annoying from a journalistic point of view. It’s the same for [my colleague], he can only produce stories on the opposition. I think it would be really healthy for both of us if I could go to East-Aleppo, and he could go to Damascus.

In other words, it was precisely by sacrificing individual journalists’ multiperspectivality, that the news programmes as a whole were able to cover a wider variety of perspectives, peoples and places. By doing so, the editors hoped to circumvent the problem other newsrooms ran by having only one specialized Middle East journalist, who would be more easily prone to residing with one side only.

These individual journalists, in turn, developed an altogether different strategy, by first visiting Syria through an official visa before entering areas held by a range of oppositional groups, including secular, fundamentalist and Kurdish rebels on different occasions. Even though this way of proceeding prevented them from gaining access through the official channels afterwards, it did enable them to cover the different aspects and actors of the conflict at least once. This strategy was particularly deployed by parachute journalists, who were, at the time of their first visits, more often than not unaware of the implications caused by entering the country through rebel groups. Again, this way of dealing with the situation emerged organically rather than reflexively: it was the nature of the situation and their past acts that led them to act in this way. As in the case of the news programmes organizing a labour division between their Middle East specialists, these journalists sought to maintain the ideal of presenting a plurality of perspectives. The main difference with these individual reporters, however, is that their response to the situation was not designed for frequent reports and analyses, but rather for occasional, more subjective stories deepening the reports made by desk journalists. As a result, the labour-division taking place here was between specialized parachute reporters and their desk-based colleagues.

The implications of this type of response were twofold. On the one hand, these parachutists were relatively satisfied with their work as it covered what they considered to be the most important actors of the war: the official regime, Islamic fundamentalists and the more secular rebel groups. As one of them explained: ‘I feel pretty confident that I have, in my own little way of doing fieldwork, tried and explored the three different routes’, adding that he felt he didn’t have ‘anything to add’ to the news coverage of the conflict at the time. As far as he was concerned, other wars and conflicts across the globe deserved as much attention as the one in Syria. On the other hand, however, the news programmes these journalists worked for became more reliant upon desk-based reporting through press releases, video footage, NGO reports and analyses by colleagues working in the region. In short, by having one reporter showing different sides of the conflict, these news programmes inevitably exposed themselves to less readily verifiable sources.

Print journalists resorting to a much safer approach used Skype to interview people of different political persuasions on either side of the border, as Skype has long been considered one of the safest communication means for rebels and activists in the Middle East (Andén-Papadopoulos and Pantti, 2013b). Even though this approach did provide journalists with access to particular individuals, it also left them with little means to verify and control the accuracy of their accounts. Furthermore, Syrians’ general caution of intelligence agents emerging in the most unexpected of disguises also meant that they were often reluctant to identify themselves or substantiate their claims with concrete names and places. Journalists responded to this situation in two general ways, both of which were designed to control for the comparably low reliability of their mediated witnesses. Some relied on a very wide, more superficial network of individuals they could reach through colleagues, fixers and friends. They would use these networks (through telephone and social media) to do background checks on the persons they interviewed and the stories they told. They made their judgement by taking into account a wide range of opinions and interpretations, which would allow them to assess the perils and caveats of any particular statement. Other reporters used an apparently opposite type of strategy, as they claimed to rely on Skype interviews only for interviewing individuals they had known personally for quite some time. This precautionary measure lead them not so much to trust what their interviewees said, but rather to estimate their background and affiliations by themselves so that this could at least be taken into consideration. While these reporters of course also possessed a wide personal network, they would thus use more in-depth relations to deal with the uncertainty inherent in mediated interviews.

More exceptionally, some of the print journalists were able to keep their options open by reporting anonymously from rebel-held or besieged areas. This response was available only to those who had lived in Syria for a longer period of time, which meant they could rely on the support of comparably elaborate personal networks. Even though abductions were relatively rare at the time, reporting anonymously remained highly dangerous, not only due to the ongoing violence but mainly because of the threats their beloved ones would receive from the intelligence services, even to the point of physical intimidation. While the services were careful enough not to harm them – as journalists they retained the power to spread their witness to the world – the message to leave the country was communicated clearly enough. Lastly, it should be noted that this strategy was generally limited to the first 6 months after the start of the uprisings in March 2011: it thus took the intelligence services less than half a year to expel at least all Dutch-speaking journalists from its territory.

Situation: Being embedded

Once journalists had acquired an official visa, they still had to deal with the ‘minders’ sent along by the ‘Ministry of Information’. While officially serving to ‘guide and protect’ as fixers normally do, these government employees made reports on journalists’ precise whereabouts and activities, whilst leading them to places that were ‘safe’ both for the journalist and for the Syrian government. In a particular case, one reporter visiting Damascus was repeatedly refused entrance to a public park and a public school where refugees had settled, both by his minder and by locals apparently coincidentally hanging out on the corners of the park. Furthermore, these minders were known to deliberately mistranslate interviewees’ stories, and sometimes even force the latter into giving the right answers through verbal and on some occasions even unabashedly physical intimidation. In one case, a reporter recalled noticing a group of men approaching behind him as he was talking to a man who had found shelter in a public school that was now governed by the Syrian army. Within one sentence, the man swiftly changed the term ‘forces of resistance’ to ‘terrorists’.

Of course, rebel groups were equally keen to show journalists their version of the facts, whether they were secular groups de-emphasizing the role played by sectarian motives in the conflict, or extremists claiming precisely the opposite. In one particularly striking case, it turned out that some of the female Kurdish fighters who had been widely covered in the international media, were set-up precisely to reframe the media coverage and to attract more sympathy from the West. In two cases, journalists had encountered at least one group of ‘staged’ women fighters before finding one that truly participated in the YPG, the Kurdish People Protection Units. The story of independent, emancipated women was thought – rightfully so, as it turned out – to draw the attention of the secular West, as it provided an interesting side-story to the orientalist stereotype of head-scarfed women repressed by their men.

Strategies

All the journalists entering the country through official visas devoted considerable attention to minders’ efforts to prevent independent coverage. In one case, a reporter who had been given permission to report from Damascus set out to produce a news story on, first, the Yarmouk refugee camp – which was at the time rumoured to be starved to death by the Syrian forces; second, to persons taking refuge in a public school controlled by government staff; and third, to refugees gathered in a public park. While none of these attempts were granted by the accompanying minders, in the case of the public park some ‘locals’ intervened as well, saying that there was nothing to be seen, and that it would not be safe for journalists to go there. Subsequently, the topic of the news story did not focus on the refugees’ fate, but rather on the obstacles thrown up to prevent journalists from reaching them. In addition, some journalists produced additional side-reports on ‘how the news was made’. Two broadcast reporters, for instance, published ‘behind the scenes’ footage on social media, whereas one journalist provided his alternative medium with a text on the relevance of fixers and unreliable local contacts. As these journalists found themselves in situations where the limitations of reporting the more or less transparent representation of facts became all too obvious, they thus reacted by shifting their attention towards the representation itself, as it formed part and parcel of the conflict they were covering.

This strategy can be related to some of the criticisms of the standard of ‘objectivity’ (Deuze, 2005; Hallin, 1992; Stoker, 1995) – and, accordingly, to some of the criticisms raised in the coverage of the Iraq war (Tumber and Palmer, 2004). As Boudana (2010) noted, the French war correspondents in her study generally rejected the notion of ‘objectivity’, conceived of as a form of neutrality, in favour of values such as ‘honesty’ and ‘modesty’. As their working conditions often did not allow them to verify or double-check the facts which was needed to take the position of an omniscient reporter towering above the earthly turmoil of their news subjects, they felt it more useful to revert to values of honesty and modesty, meaning that one needs to be fair enough to report simply what you have seen, and to communicate on the limits of your particular point of view.

However, while these strategies were quite visibly present in journalists’ reports on the Syrian regime, they seemed to be much less articulated in reports that were made by journalists embedded with rebel groups. This is at least partly due to the professional, more openly systematic manner in which Syrian government-minders were preventing journalists from talking to particular people or visiting specific sites. While the fact that they were being ‘embedded’ with rebel groups was openly announced by journalists at the beginning of their reports, the consequences thereof were only mentioned in terms of their willingness to tell us their story, or to show us which homes had been destroyed or which bodies had been killed by the Syrian regime. Overall, journalists did not explicitly thematize rebel groups’ attempts to prevent them from seeing particular sites or persons. In this sense, I do not recall any reporter, either written or broadcast, publicly communicating the staged nature of some of the female Kurdish fighters – even though two journalists noted their awareness of this practice in the interviews.

In addition, some of the journalists I spoke to claimed to have made use of a more intricate strategy to bypass some of the constraints posed by being embedded, as they developed confidential relations with particular minders. In Syria, as in other Middle East states, some minders would allow journalists to move about more freely than others, albeit within certain limits. Thus, if a reporter succeeded in developing a more friendly relationship with some minders, the latter might desist at least from physically intimidating the subjects the reporter was trying to interview. While such relationships clearly did not provide journalists with all the freedom they desired, it did seem to give them a little bit of breathing space, enabling them to estimate the context of their environment slightly better. Especially to well-known visitors, the Ministry of Information also allowed a little bit of leeway in moving about: two reporters even said they had filed complaints with the Ministry on minders who had not sufficiently allowed them to do their work properly, after which they were assigned other minders on their next visits.

Together, the impediments I have described thus far fed into the more general problem of providing evidence for the claims journalists made in their reports. In other words, the accuracy of the information they disseminated was often hard to verify and generally impossible to double-check. In response to these difficulties, some journalists felt confident enough to interpret rumours and statements in their own manner, in a way reminiscent of Tuchman’s (1972) editor, who explained that ‘analysis’ served as a name for news reports that could not be boiled down to verified empirical facts. These journalists felt able to estimate both the likeliness of unverified information, as well as actors’ true intentions, thereby situating them within the more general course of affairs. This form of guaranteeing the accuracy of news reports, however, was based on journalists’ wider knowledge of the conflict, the region and his or her capacities for drawing the right conclusions out of vague and disconnected bits of information (Hannerz, 2004). These insights were thus only accessible to either long-term permanent correspondents in the region, or to strongly specialized parachutists (e.g. in Middle East conflicts), whereas generalist parachutists or freelancers would revert to, respectively, the verifiable facts irrespective of their low informational value, or to the subjectivist approaches described below.

These subjectivist approaches often entailed what has been characterized as more ‘phenomenological methods’ (Kester, 2010; Murrell, 2009, 2010) or ‘naturalist’ techniques (Graddol, 1994), that is, limiting oneself to a detailed description of what one sees, senses, smells or hears. These descriptions then serve as a ‘proof’ only of how reality was at a certain point of time in a certain place, instead of telling their audience of the general state of affairs, from the perspective of an omniscient, objective spectator. Rather than being driven by a shift in general journalistic ideals (Deuze, 2005; Hallin, 1992), these methods seemed to spring from the difficult situations they faced in Syria, as a full-blown form of objectivity seemed to be out of reach. These techniques thus served to cover at least a modest piece of reality truthfully. One reporter, for instance, was allowed to visit parts of a besieged town that had just been recaptured by the Syrian army. While the scene and its people were real enough, they were also arranged in the sense that journalists were presumably meant to report on the misery of people returning to their destroyed homes and neighbourhoods for the first time in several years, and to link their misery to what the regime considered to be its main perpetrator: the rebel forces. The journalist responded to the situation by writing down simply what he saw, as part of the reality he encountered. That is, by deliberately not including the structural–political context of the scene, he sought to escape from a form of partial, biased news coverage in favour of the regime. Hence the story he told was one of the experience of war, rather than its politics.

Furthermore, this method was put to use by some journalists in a rather ingenious way: some of these phenomenologically described stories functioned as a complement to a news event that had been verified by experts or authoritative media. In one particular case, a reporter set out to visit neighbourhoods where chemical weapons had been deployed to explore what the impact had been, how the locals had experienced those attacks, and what they thought about the international commotion it had caused. By focusing on the particular topic of chemical weapons, the reporter was thus able to develop his story on the facts gathered by international weapon experts and NGOs on the ground. The double-checking of facts and information had thus been done elsewhere. In a variant on the same reporting technique, a reporter visiting the Zaattari refugee camp in Jordan focused in detail on one particular family’s story, precisely because their story could be linked to already verified information on the refugee flow of their group (coming from a particular area and minority in Syria). While the accuracy of their particular subjective story could thus not be verified, the availability of more general information nevertheless provided it with a grounding that was deemed sufficiently reasonable.

Situation: Physical risks and dangers

The physical risks and dangers journalists face when entering a war zone are a different but well-known type of practical impediment for doing their work properly (Tumber, 2009). Besides the general violence inherent to the frontline, this also includes exposure to singular terrorist attacks, as well as abductions – which have become a widespread phenomenon in Syria, as they did in neighbouring Iraq a decade before (Reporters Without Borders, 2013). No matter through which channels they entered Syria, journalists always put their lives in the hands of the groups they were embedded with. In this sense, the protection one might have expected from the Syrian government when travelling with official visa and security staff, did not always live up to its expectations. One of the reporters had survived a surprise terrorist attack on a convoy of foreign journalists in which one of his colleagues was killed. The precise timing of the attack led the surviving journalists to suspect the Syrian government itself to be responsible, even though they were never able to substantiate those suspicions. Perhaps even more than in previous Middle East conflicts, the war in Syria has seen journalists themselves become the subject of deliberate attacks and abductions, rather than part of the mere accidental casualties inherent to any warfare.

Strategies

Compared to their allegedly better equipped colleagues at the BBC and CNN, the Dutch and Flemish reporters had no security staff at their disposal. Instead, their local fixers served as security agents by guiding them to safe places and by helping them to pass borders and rebel-held checkpoints. The judgement these journalists made, in other words, was to seek to maintain their safety not through physical protection, but rather through strengthening their local ties, relying on native speakers and fixers who would lead them away from hazard in the first place. While this judgement seemed to be incited by their comparably smaller financial capabilities – as they simply could not afford to hire more specialized security staff – it seemed to enable them to slightly change the situation to their advantage, by putting higher stakes on sustainable relations with fixers. The downside of this strategy, however, was that it increased journalists’ dependency on fixers in providing access to news stories, as had been briefly but was becoming increasingly documented by scholars (Murrell, 2009, 2010; Palmer and Fontan, 2007). In line with the findings from these scholars’ work, the journalists I interviewed tried to tackle this issue by using only those fixers who had been recommended by at least one of their (inter)national colleagues or, in other cases, by relying on Dutch or Flemish fixers who had been living in the region for quite some time.

And yet, in the Syrian case, this situation of dependency seemed even more complicated compared to the one faced by journalists in Iraq a decade before. Not only is access to ‘ordinary people’ limited by the fixer’s own network and identity in spite of his or her best intentions, as Palmer and Fontan (2007) remarked, but in Syria all fixers are themselves strongly dependent upon their network within particular rebel groups. In other words: there are no ‘ordinary Syrians’ left out of the civil war: the only way to access them is not through an unconsciously biased fixer, but through the increasingly professional communication staff working for particular movements involved in the conflict themselves.

Situation: Emotional and moral intensity

Besides these practical challenges to journalistic autonomy, reporters covering the Middle East quite regularly find themselves in extraordinarily intense and morally ambivalent situations (Allan and Zelizer, 2004b). More often than their colleagues working at home or as foreign correspondents in liberal democracies, they encounter horrific scenes of human suffering, interviewing men and women who have lost just about everything – their house, their family, their freedom. Rather than posing a clear-cut challenge to implementing journalistic principles, these intense situations force journalists to reinterpret the key values underlying their work (Frosh and Pinchevski, 2009; Silverstone, 2007). How much room should they provide, in such dramatic encounters, for emotional accounts and gruesome images? Should such suffering be linked to political responsibilities and structural causes, even if you are brought to these victims by one of the actors involved?

Strategies: Critical distance and subjectivist engagement

The literatures on distant suffering and media ethics have widely recognized two broad stances towards situations such as these (Chouliaraki, 2008; Pantti, 2010; Silverstone, 2007). One type of response entails a more objective, ‘realist’ perspective in which journalists attempt to maintain their critical distance. The other advocates a more subjective, ‘naturalist’ approach allowing more room for personal experiences and emotional narratives. Both types of responses comprise a wider range of more concrete strategies to deal with these morally or emotionally intense situations.

The more objectivist approach is characterized first and foremost by the relatively marginal and succinct inclusion of emotional experiences. In such an account, the emphasis lies more on, for instance, the verified facts. In one case, a reporter who was shown dozens of corpses piled up in a mosque felt reluctant to cover it in detail because he had not been there when any of the action had happened and he could not provide any reliable information as to the identity of the bodies nor of the event’s perpetrators. His sense was that he needed to stick to the facts of the situation, whatever they may be, and they were simply not clear enough for him to go into detail on the corpses themselves. Thus, in this case, the inability to verify the factual context provided by the locals led him to give it no central, visual place in his report. In a slightly different vein, one reporter decided to include the heavily tortured man who had shown him his wounds, yet without concentrating on the visual image of the wound, but rather putting his story in the broader context of the politics, interests and tactics that caused the victim’s suffering. Instead of what he described as ‘indulging the audience’ in the gruesome picture, this reporter chose to use that man’s story as an exemplifying vehicle to discuss the political impasse as two sides blamed each other for their atrocities.

Interestingly, reporters who tended towards this objectivist stance would allow more intense emotional accounts on the apparent condition that they fitted into more established, conventional story lines, such as a visit to the Zaattari refugee camp. More precisely, they seemed to be reluctant to include more intense stories and images unless they involved pure, de-politicized victims, such as young children. This selective openness towards more emotional accounts can be understood from a more strict interpretation of professional norms and values: in order for an emotional account to be made into a story, it had to fit within one of the established journalistic formats or ‘story lines’ (Hannerz, 2004) allowing such an exceptional leniency.

Perhaps more characteristic of the objectivist, professional stance is the way some journalists dealt with relationships of trust. Reporting on Syria includes generally sensitive topics, requiring a great deal of mutual trust between journalists and their interviewees, even more so when there are cameras, microphones and security staff involved. To develop these trust relationships, journalists and/or their fixers need to invest in long, personal talks and elaborate conversations on seemingly irrelevant topics. When the interview is finished and the story is sent to the editors, journalists generally have very little time left to maintain or deepen much of these personal interactions as new stories are waiting to be reported. Hence, this involvement at least potentially throws up questions of how a journalist maintains a balance between developing these personal relations through mutual respect and empathy, on the one hand, and keeping a professional distance, on the other. Arguably, both are needed to deliver a good story within ethically desirable boundaries yet, due to the central role of (emotional and moral) empathy in such situations, journalists are bound to position themselves differently along the continuum of engagement and difference.

In one case, a dispute arose between two reporters travelling to a small village in Lebanon. A few months earlier, one of them had interviewed a man diagnosed with cancer and the reporter wanted to make some time available to stop in his particular village and ask around how this man had been in the meantime. Whereas that reporter felt obliged to do this after taking credit for the ill man’s story, the other one considered such a stop to be both a waste of time and an inappropriately personal way of behaving. Even though it should be noted that the latter did express his concerns for the subjects presented in his stories, he seemed to endorse a more minimal account of good journalism’s ethical boundaries. While not returning to the village of the ill man was denounced as something immoral by the more engaged journalist, the same response was defended by his colleague as a matter of mature professionalism.

In general, the more engaged stance entailed the use of phenomenological methods, in which emotions and subjective experiences were considered to be part of an objective reality (Pantti, 2010). Of crucial importance here is the fact that these decisions to do so were often taken by listening carefully to one’s own emotions. In one particular case, when a reporter and his colleagues visited the Zaattari refugee camp, a little girl collapsed into inconsolable hysteria, right in front of the recording camera, after being told that her favourite toy had been left at home. One of the difficulties emerging from this situation was whether or not this emotional footage should be given a central place in the wider report or not. The journalists and editors involved thus had to make a judgement on the precise place of emotion, context and facts within the small limit of time that was available to this particular story. At the moment this happened, most of the production crew either burst into tears or walked away from the tent to prevent them from doing so. The decision was then taken collectively, I was told, to use the footage not only as a dominant part of the story, but also to briefly show the journalist himself as openly displaying his empathy. The rationale behind that move was that the team’s emotional reaction reflected the broader reality of the refugee camp and its approximately 200,000 children, which it could then bring closer to the audience watching the news in western Europe. In a similar vein, another reporter’s decision to build his story around a tall man whimpering over the remnants of his home was taken only after he had heard the shivering in his own voice as he interviewed the man, when listening to his recorder on the way home.

Another type of strategy was included in the same story but returned time and again among the journalists I interviewed. By focusing on ‘ordinary people’s suffering’, they sought to universalize the ‘human condition’ of war. Thus, by putting the crying refugee child or the whimpering tall man into the heart of the story, they maintained a central emphasis on the emotional experience without necessarily taking (political) sides. The emotional register of these reports thus consisted of an empathic stance, as distinct from a form of indignation that stems from particular people’s suffering caused by specific perpetrators (Boltanski, 1999). Such reports emerged primarily in the early period of the Syrian uprisings, where journalists often took sides with ‘the public’ and their suffering inflicted by the regime, and resurfaced with the repeated chemical weapons attack at the end of August 2013.