Media feeding frenzies are never pretty. Even less so when they are passed off as serious journalism. The coverage following Israel’s September attack on Syria has again highlighted the deficiencies of the Western press in covering the region. Speculation passed off as fact, the use of unnamed sources, a lack of any real evidence, sensationalism and a steadfast refusal to engage in debates that may get in the way of a good story has typified much of the reporting. Whatever we eventually learn about what was bombed, the double standards which the mainstream media operates under when covering countries it deems as being ‘bad’ exposes fatal flaws in the world’s most free media establishments.
What we do know is that on September 6, 2007, Israel attacked a military facility in the northern province of Raqqa. News of the strike first emerged via the Syrian Arab News Agency some 12-hours after the raid. Initial reports in US and European newspapers said the attack was carried out to test Syrian radar reactions or destroy an arms cache bound for Hizbullah.
The nuclear angle did not emerge until September 12 when the New York Times wrote in paragraph six of a 12-paragraph article: “Israel had recently carried out reconnaissance flights over Syria, taking pictures of possible nuclear installations that Israeli officials believed might have been supplied with material from North Korea.”
The story soon progressed. No possibility — expect, of course, that Syria may not be building a nuclear bomb — was too far fetched. On September 22, London’s The Times splashed with: “Snatched: Israeli commandos ‘nuclear’ raid.” The article breathlessly relayed a daring operation in which “Israeli commandos from the elite Sayeret Matkal unit — almost certainly dressed in Syrian uniforms” secretly seized samples of nuclear material from the site before it was bombed. Laboratory tests, according to the paper, confirmed the material was “North Korean in origin.”
The article was written entirely from unnamed American and Israeli sources. No evidence of this North Korean supplied nuclear material has been produced. No independent analysis regarding the likelihood of such a raid, or the reasons why American and Israeli sources might leak such information to the media is ventured into. Instead, unnamed sources from governments opposed to both Syria and North Korea are given free space in a major international newspaper to air serious allegations without the provision of any evidence and, characteristically of the media’s coverage surrounding the event, seemingly without question.
By October 13, the New York Times had concluded that Syria was running a nuclear program. In an article headlined “Israel Struck Syrian Nuclear Program, Analysts say,” reporters David E. Sanger and Mark Mazzetti write that Israeli and American intelligence agencies judged the site to be “a partly constructed nuclear reactor.” The analysis answers one of the “central mysteries” surrounding the purpose of the attack. In all, unnamed “officials”, “intelligence analysts” and “senior policy makers” are mentioned 19 times.
The third paragraph compares the Israeli raid with Israel’s bombing of the Iraqi Osirak nuclear plant in 1981 — further cementing the impression Israel did indeed strike a nuclear facility. By the fifth paragraph the usual qualifiers “suspected” and “alleged” are dropped altogether and the authors write: “Many details remain unclear, most notably … whether the Syrians could make a plausible case that the reactor was intended to produce electricity.” What is no longer in doubt is that the site was a nuclear reactor. The only question now in need of answering is if the Syrians would consider using such technology for anything else other than the destruction of the Jewish state.
It takes the reader until paragraph nine to learn: “Even though it has signed the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, Syria would not have been obligated to declare the existence of a reactor during the early phases of construction. It would have also had the legal right to complete construction of the reactor, as long as its purpose was to generate electricity.”
The “central mysteries” of the opening paragraphs, the reader can assume, are not why newspapers like the New York Times gave Israel the right to attack her neighbors even when, as the article admits, Syria was in no breach of international law. The media’s use of unnamed sources, particularly from an administration that has a track record of skewing intelligence, is also not open for debate. The possibility that the intelligence leaks which the article is based on are part of a disinformation campaign is also too far fetched a proposition for serious news agencies to explore. After all, only “axis of evil” governments lie.
Such coverage is even more disingenuous given the public hand-wringing that much of the media — particularly the New York Times — put on display when it became clear their coverage of Saddam’s WMD program was fiction, not fact. Earnest pledges to raise the journalistic bar were given. Little, it seems, has been learned. Until journalists and editors apply the same journalistic norms throughout all their work, regardless of whether the story is emanating from Washington or Damascus, their credibility will remain severely compromised.
John Dagge is a freelance journalist based in Damascus.
