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The tall tales and outright misinformation that tainted so much reporting from Syria convinced him that more objective coverage was essential to bolster the effort to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad.
Syrian Newspapers Emerge to Fill Out War Reporting
Lynsey Addario for The New York Times
Workers print the Free Syria newspaper in Gaziantep, Turkey.
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
Published: April 1, 2013
ANTAKYA, Turkey — Absi Smesem became the editor in chief of a new weekly
Syrian newspaper hoping to leave behind what he disparaged as the
“Facebook phase” of the uprising.
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Daniel Etter for The New York Times
Pages of Sham on the wall of the newspaper’s offices in Antakya, Turkey.
Daniel Etter for The New York Times
“There are no objective sources of information on
either side, neither with the regime nor the rebels," said Absi Smesem,
newspaper editor.
Daniel Etter for The New York Times
Syrian opposition fighters read a copy of Sham, a
weekly newspaper, during a conference in Reyhanli, Turkey, on Feb. 28.
The tall tales and outright misinformation that tainted so much reporting from Syria convinced him that more objective coverage was essential to bolster the effort to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad.
Too often, he said, he could not believe what passed for news on popular satellite channels, like the Qatari-owned Al Jazeera and the Saudi-run Al Arabiya,
both staunch opposition supporters. The two channels relied heavily on
unfiltered reports from local activists hired as correspondents, or,
failing that, grabbed whatever they found posted on Facebook to report
as news, he said.
When Mr. Smesem’s hometown, Binnish, in northern Syria, was under siege
by the Syrian Army, he said, one activist-cum-correspondent used the
local expression “Dabahoona dbah,” which in Arabic literally means “We
are being slaughtered” — but which the people of northern Syria use to
mean “We cannot breathe.”
Within minutes, a breaking-news headline scrolled across the television
screen saying Syrian government forces were committing a massacre in
Binnish.
“There are no objective sources of information on either side, neither
with the regime nor the rebels,” said Mr. Smesem, 46, a veteran reporter
with graying hair and an easy laugh. He told the story over a
late-night cup of tea in a cafe in this southern Turkish city, a nerve
center for Syrians struggling to shape their future state even as the
gory civil war drags into its third year.
“We need to get out of this Facebook phase, where all we do is whine and complain about the regime,” he said.
Mr. Smesem said he believed that the rampant exaggeration harmed the
cause of the rebellion. “When the regime simply denied the news, and
they were right, that gave the regime more credibility,” he said.
For media analysts, coverage of the Syrian war has seriously eroded the
reputations of channels like Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya. Where their
newscasts once brought a measure of objectivity to a region dominated by
servile state-run media, they are increasingly viewed as mouthpieces
for the foreign policy objectives of Qatar and Saudi Arabia.
“The major pan-Arab networks have lost a great deal of credibility on
the Syria story,” said Marc Lynch, director of the Middle East studies
program at George Washington University.
Mr. Lynch said the change was particularly striking for Al Jazeera, once
considered must-see TV during any Middle East crisis. “Al Jazeera has
lost its ability to be the neutral ground where Arabs who disagree about
things can argue,” he said.
It was in the spirit of objectivity that Mr. Smesem’s newspaper, Sham,
another name for Syria in Arabic, began publishing in February. It was
one of several publications introduced at roughly the same time.
The Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, an opposition group stronger in exile
than it is domestically, just began publishing its newspaper, Al-Ahd, or
The Vow. The initial edition took a “we told you so” attitude toward
the level of violence fomented by the government; the Brotherhood was
evidently trying to address its checkered reputation within Syria for
being partly responsible for the mini-civil war that erupted around
1980.
Another weekly paper, Free Syria, published in nearby Gaziantep, Turkey,
shares an ideological viewpoint with the Sham weekly by endorsing
pluralism, moderate Islam and democracy. At least one large military
brigade is publishing its own paper, called Brigades, which has been
raising questions about the origins of extremist Muslim fighters.
Numerous Muslim extremist groups, including the Nusra Front, or Jabhet
al-Nusra, tend to print short pamphlets to spread their ideas, like
attacks on anything that smacks of a civil state.
“We as Muslims have rebelled against all values of the infidel Western
society,” said one pamphlet, called The Caliphate, published in the
small town of Al-Sahhara in northern Syria. “So how can we kick
secularism out the door while opening the window to accept it under a
new form and a new name, a civil state?”
Sham is in many ways the most professional of the bunch, with a
well-ordered, crisp layout. The newspaper is an extension of the Sham
News Network, an activist news organization and research center. It was
founded by a Syrian who returned to Damascus from abroad early in the
uprising, and the paper is financed using money raised privately.
Mr. Smesem, working in a smoky, one-room newsroom with just a couple of
other editors, said he relied on 15 reporters from throughout Syria. His
commitment to avoid using activists to report means that coverage is
sparse from some embattled cities, like Deir al-Zour in the east.
He avoids trying to cover every firefight, instead looking for themes or
trends. Each 16-page edition includes cultural pages, translations from
foreign coverage and one of the infamous cartoons from the town of Kafr
Nabl that skewer the Assad government and anemic foreign support for
the rebels.
“The distribution is a bit random,” Mr. Smesem said, with delivery
inside Syria often determined by which roads are safe. Of the 6,000
copies printed, up to 4,000 are distributed free throughout Syria, with
the rest available by subscription abroad.
Once the war ends, Mr. Smesem and his publisher said, they hope Sham
grows into a full media empire, including radio and television stations.
It is a common ambition for other Syrians starting newspapers now.
If Mr. Smesem avoids Facebook as a rumor mill when it comes to news, he
embraces it and other satellite Internet connections as the means to
stay in secret contact with his far-flung correspondents and the stable
of activists on whom he relies for tips. His reporters write under
pseudonyms — a few are even government employees, he said.
Although the paper staunchly backs the revolution, Mr. Smesem strives to
include the Syrian government viewpoint, basically relying on official
statements as the Western press does.
Mr. Smesem said he had faced sharper criticism from people in the revolution than from the government.
“Someone said he felt like he was reading a Russian newspaper,” he said.
“People who are enthusiastic about the revolution think that we should
not include the view of the other side because they don’t deserve it,
but we are trying to be as neutral as possible.”
Mr. Smesem has used the paper to confront the mood of intimidation that
he said had infected towns like Binnish, where supporters of the
fundamentalist Salafi movement leveraged their success on the
battlefield to take over the town council.
In one editorial, he criticized changes in the tone of the town’s weekly
Friday protests since the Nusra Front began organizing them. The very
people who now shouted about killing all the Alawites were once members
of the Binnish Coordination Committee who marched every Friday in
support of civil society, he wrote.
Now Sham editors worry whether the new freedom of expression that has
emerged in the areas seized from government control will persist should
the Assad government fall.
“The revolution has started to give what it was started for,” said the
paper’s managing editor, speaking anonymously to avoid any repercussions
for his family still inside Syria. “What we don’t know is what will
happen after the regime falls.”
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