By Aktham Suleiman | Al-Akhbar | May 10, 2014
At first glance, he appears like a model of high-caliber, professional journalism. The German reporter heads to the Syrian city of Aleppo, the scene of fierce battles between the two sides of the conflict, documenting everything with photos and videos on his way. Thirty seconds into his televised report, the reporter, who is wearing an ordinary jacket, says, “It’s better to wear an additional ordinary jacket over the bulletproof vest to conceal the press label. We are told the soldiers on the other side take pleasure in shooting journalists.”
Thus, the reporter showed his political, journalistic, and moral bias to one side at the outset, as he alluded to an unverifiable “fact” and a psychological state among the other side that cannot be measured, that is “taking pleasure in shooting journalists.” In truth, this is a common mistake that goes against the principles that Western journalism schools teach their students, including that professional journalists should not be biased in favor of any cause, no matter how “just” it may be. This mistake has marked nearly all Western media coverage of the Syrian crisis for at least two years, and only in the third year of the conflict did this begin to change somewhat.
The German reporter then made his second mistake when he said, “The rebels will escort us today to the battlefronts.” But he forgot to say that the “rebels” had not only escorted him to the front, as he claimed, but had been escorting him since he entered Syria and would escort him until he leaves. The reporter was therefore under the influence of those fighters, to whom he was indebted for protecting him. We can even apply the label “embedded journalist” to his case, bearing in mind that embedded journalism, apart from all the fundamental objections against it, has become a necessity in covering certain complex conflicts. Let us also bear in mind that the journalists accompanying the Syrian army can be said to be embedded too. But journalists who meet all the requirements of being embedded, for all intents and purposes, must disclose this fact.
The German reporter then made a third mistake, by not attributing information to sources; he said, “The victims are mainly civilians who were killed in Syrian army airstrikes or shelling, or after being captured by regime forces.” But he failed to mention that this information came from rebel sources. This is not to doubt the validity of the information, but information should be sourced properly in the interest of accuracy and for the sake of a history that will one day be written based on the archives of the press and the media.
It would be easy to accuse the Western reporter mentioned above of being part of a global media war on the Syrian regime. But – away from accusations and speculations – how can serious professional errors in a report by a supposedly professional reporter working for a reputable media outlet be explained? How and why do such errors take place, and what are the political and non-political climates that facilitate these slips?
In the following paragraphs, we will attempt to answer these questions by applying the ideas of Systems Theory, which holds that everything consists of systems, and that analysis should address systems as a whole not just their individual parts. According to this theory, separate analyses of journalists, recipients, or the press are incomplete. The press – including reporters, recipients, and mediums – is a system consisting of smaller standalone systems, such as the newsroom for example. But this system is not isolated from other complex systems, such as the economy, politics, culture, ideology, and religion, not to mention the linguistic and technical systems, and other systems. Together, these form a larger system, which in turn is part of even larger systems.
So beyond the person and biases of the individual journalists, their often-vague understanding of their role, and editorial or public opinion pressures on them – all possible causes for errors – there is another hidden source for blunders that cannot be determined without analyzing the systems that prevail in a given moment. This can be clarified in the context of the German reporter in Syria, by changing some variable related to the “system” surrounding him.
Let us imagine the same correspondent was escorted by a group of Taliban fighters in Afghanistan in the same manner, instead of Syrian fighters in Aleppo, and that the German reporter relayed their ideas, statements, and sentiments. It’s hard to imagine this happening, but why? What is the difference between Afghanistan and Syria? Should professional journalism not maintain a professional distance from the issues it covers, with standards that apply regardless of the place and the affiliations of the reporters? The answer is yes on the surface, but not if we adopt the approach of Systems Theory.
Journalists, applying this theory, regardless of how professional they may or may not be, are part of a system; they are not extraterrestrial beings completely detached from the world. If these journalists are producers of information, opinions, and sentiments, then they are also their recipients. In order for a German reporter to propose escorting a group of Taliban fighters to the editorial board in his or her institution, he or she would have had to spent the period between 2000 and 2014 in hibernation, not hearing about the 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington, or the subsequent war on terror that brought German soldiers all the way to Afghanistan. In other words, the reporter would have to be detached from political, ideological, and historical systems to which he or she belongs, and which define the Taliban as an enemy, and the invasion of Afghanistan as an operation to promote democracy.
The two cases of Afghanistan and Syria appear different on the surface, but they are not in the standards of Systems Theory. The prevailing political and ideological – and by extension, journalistic – system in the West put forward definitions and shaped attitudes at a very early stage in both Afghanistan and Syria, bearing in mind that the media is not only a system that can be influenced, but is also a system that can equally influence other systems. In the fall of 2001, then-German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder said that the attacks on New York and Washington were an assault on civilization. In the summer of 2011, French President Francois Hollande said that Assad should step down, repeating the same mantra spoken by other Western leaders that Assad was a ruler killing his own people. In between the two events, the Western cultural system concluded that the countries of the southern and eastern Mediterranean were witnessing an “Arab Spring,” seeking to achieve democracy and promote human rights.
The Western media absorbed all this information and then recycled it. The validity or invalidity of the narrative above is not important in the context of Systems Theory, because the latter belongs to a critical-analytical approach that does not recognize the existence of reality or fact to begin with, as much as it addresses the perceptions of this supposed reality, its representations in the consciousness of observers, and its influence, consequently, on their direct and indirect behavior at a given moment.
Therefore, Western reporters cannot accept to be escorted by a group of Taliban fighters. By the same token, according to the systems influencing their attitudes and work, they cannot accept to escort “our valiant soldiers,” as the opposing political and ideological System designates the soldiers of the Syrian regime army. This army, after all, according to the prevailing system in the West, is the army of the “dictator Assad,” and those fighting it are “revolutionaries” or “rebels.”
Let us assume the following scenario: a Western reporter overcomes the prevailing systems and succeeds in convincing the editorial board at his or her institution of allowing him or her to escort a unit of the Syrian army in combat. The Syrian army command, which does not know the features of the reporter’s System, agrees. The reporter then returns safely from his or her trip, with a full report. (For the sake of political balance, we can similarly imagine a scenario where a Syrian state television reporter escorts a group of Free Syrian Army fighters). How professional would the report of the Western journalist in question be?
Most likely, the report will stick to the letter to the rules of professional journalism. Opinions will be separated from facts, and facts will be properly sourced, with full disclosure about the circumstances of being embedded with a Syrian army unit. It is unlikely that the reporter would conjecture about what goes on in the head of unseen fighters from the other side, such as that “they take pleasure in shooting journalists,” or to endorse wholesale claims made by Syrian soldiers about the “civilian victims of terrorist gangs.”
In conclusion, we have to say in the context of answering the original question of the article about the source of journalistic blunders and professional slips, away from the political characterization of all of the above, that reporters in general tend to pursue accuracy and a cautious approach, and a higher degree of professionalism, whenever they feel they are “swimming against the current.” By contrast, reporters who feel they are swimming in “friendly waters,” culturally, politically, and ideologically speaking, like the German reporter mentioned in the beginning, will tend to make more blunders as long as their work will be accepted in advance by the editorial System first, and the prevailing cultural system second, and then the political and ideological Systems at higher levels.
We must also note – away from the behavior of a journalist and the quality of his or her work – another no less important result: Influencing the press in today’s world no longer involves simple methods as was the case in the previous century. Rather, this plays out in other places and through systems that, at first glance, appear far removed from the media, before the influence slowly reaches the media that believes itself to be independent and free, when the reality is far different.
Aktham Suliman is a Syrian journalist and researcher based in Germany.