Part of a Syrian state television report on Friday’s bombings of government sites in the city of Aleppo.
As my colleague Neil MacFarquhar reports, the flood of video documenting atrocities in Syria has intensified in the past 24 hours, with gruesome images broadcast on state television following bomb blasts in the city of Aleppo and more clips posted online by opposition activists of the assault on besieged neighborhoods of Homs.
On Friday, Syrian state media reports, featuring graphic views of corpses, blamed the bombing of military and police targets in Aleppo on “terrorists.” A spokesman for the Free Syrian Army, an opposition group of military defectors, denied involvement and called the explosions a cynical government ploy to draw attention from the bombardment of Homs.
A day earlier, residents of Homs told The Times by telephone that there had been no pause in the shelling of contested neighborhoods by government forces. To illustrate the assault on Homs, opposition activists uploaded a stream of video to the Web featuring now-familiar images of heavy weapons fire tearing through the neighborhood of Baba Amr, and distressing clips of civilian casualties.
Video posted online by Syrian opposition activists on Friday, said to show government tanks shelling the Baba Amr district of Homs.
While that amateur video, recorded and distributed by activists, seems to have the ring of truth for many observers watching the crisis unfold in cities that are largely off limits to foreign reporters, the conflict looks quite different to viewers of two English-language satellite channels owned by the governments of Syria’s allies, Russia and Iran.
On those channels, the conflict in Syria is presented largely the same way that it has been since the start of the uprising by Syria’s own, state-run media, as an assault on a legitimate government with popular support by groups of armed terrorists.
So, for example, a news bulletin on Iran’s state-controlled Press TV on Thursday made no use of activist video, but focused instead on the claim that a leader of the rebel Free Syrian Army in Homs was killed by government forces. In the Press TV report, the commander said to have been killed, Abdul Razzaq Talas, a military defector, was described as “the ringleader of the so-called Al Farouk militant group.”
While activists describe Al Farouk as a brigade of the Free Syrian Army, defending protesters from government forces, the Iranian channel’s Web site reported that the “militant group” was “blamed for terrorist attacks against civilians and security and military forces in Syria.”
Russia Today, a Kremlin-financed channel that finds fault with Vladimir V. Putin’s government about as often as Fox News produces exposés on the Republican Party, also presents the situation in Syria as a conflict between armed groups, not a government crackdown on what started as a peaceful protest movement. Unlike the Iranian channel, the Russian network does acknowledge the claims of activists, although it also regularly broadcasts interviews with pundits who deride the opposition as terrorists.
On Friday, for instance, a Russia Today report on the bombings in Aleppo treated as absolute fact a disputed claim of responsibility from what was described as a Syrian rebel source, and then cut to a young, British correspondent who spent several weeks in Syria recently for comment.
The network’s anchor began the interview by asking: “The Free Syrian Army now claiming responsibility for these enormous blasts in Syria today, do you think there’s any chance that could change NATO states’ attitudes towards the armed opposition groups in the country?” The reporter, a contributor to both Russia Today and Press TV named Lizzie Phelan replied: “I would say that this attack was directed from London, Tel Aviv, Paris and New York.”
One day earlier, another Russia Today report from a correspondent in London claimed that activists from the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, based in Britain, were intentionally feeding news organizations “false information” about civilian casualties. A pundit featured in the report suggested that the activists were engaged in a media campaign to tarnish the government of President Bashar al-Assad in order to justify armed intervention and bring about “regime change.”
Unlike other news organizations that have sent correspondents into contested areas of Syria, evading government restrictions at great personal risk to their safety, most of Russia Today’s coverage of events in Syria seems to rely on updates from correspondents who are interviewed from studios in Damascus and screen no original video.
In an update on the fighting in Homs on Wednesday, a Russia Today anchor in Moscow interviewed a woman in a Damascus studio identified as “a local correspondent” named Diana Nemeh, whose only source of information appeared to be statements from the Syrian government on its operations against “terrorists” in the city.
As video of explosions in the city uploaded to the Web by activists played in the background, Ms. Nemeh, who appears to have no previous record as a journalist for English-language news organizations, said that there had been “fierce fighting” between the Free Syrian Army and the military in the city. She added that the Syrian government “has reported many casualties on the ground that have fallen dead in the last few days in Homs.”
Then, after a headline flashed up on the screen reading, “Reporter: Disinformation Makes it Difficult to Establish Homs Reality,” the correspondent in Damascus said, “It’s really hard to determine what’s really going on on the ground there.”
After acknowledging that activists “say that the Syrian military has basically bombed some parts of the city,” Ms. Nemeh quickly added: “the government has completely refuted any type of involvement — that they have actually shelled on its own people in the city of Homs — they blame it on the terrorist groups that have taken an active role in the city. They are spread all over the place there and causing many casualties. The government has also issued many statements today that the security forces were able to kill tens of terrorists that belong to these terrorist groups that they also believe, that are being backed by foreign influence on the ground.”
The rest of the channel’s report consisted entirely of a recitation of comments by Mr. Putin and the Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, warning other countries that military intervention on behalf of the opposition would only lead to more violence. The effect of continued Russian arms sales to the Syrian government were not mentioned.
While restrictions imposed by the Syrian government on reporting inside the country do make it difficult to verify the authenticity of claims by activists, other television networks, like the BBC, have managed to send reporters to Homs and other besieged towns to gather information and report on the situation firsthand. The coverage of the conflict on Press TV and Russia Today, by contrast, relies so heavily on interviews with correspondents seated in studios in Damascus — whose information varies little, if at all, from that on Syrian state television — that it often seems closer to ideologically driven punditry than impartial news gathering.
Before Ms. Nemeh filled that role, Ms. Phelan was featured in several reports for the networks from Damascus during her visit to the city, which lasted weeks. Early last month, Ms. Phelan also appeared as a guest on the Syrian government channel. In that interview she described how impressed she had been by the spectacle of a government-organized rally in support of President Bashar al-Assad and called BBC and Al Jazeera reports focused on unrest in the country misleading.
Ms. Phelan, 25, worked as a correspondent for both networks in Libya last year, where she earned the hatred of opposition activists for a series of reports in which she defended the Qaddafi government. Even as Tripoli fell to the Libyan rebels in late August, Ms. Phelan insisted in a report for Russia Today that video of rebel advances was not genuine, and had been fabricated by Al Jazeera as part of “the media conspiracy against Libya.”
Ms. Phelan explained in an interview with The Lede last week that she visited Damascus in January to work on a documentary with a cameraman from Iran’s semiofficial Fars news agency, which is close to the Islamic Republican Guard Corps, but reported for Press TV and Russia Today in her spare time.
During her time in Syria, Ms. Phelan claimed in a series of interviews with the channels that information supplied by the Syrian government was credible, while opposition reports were fabricated. In one appearance on Press TV from the Syrian capital, Ms. Phelan said that claims of violence by the security forces came only from activists “linked to Western intelligence services.”
In another Press TV interview late last month, Ms. Phelan claimed that “Al Jazeera has been proven many times over the last few months, over and over again, to have been broadcasting fabricated footage from Syria and from Libya.” The same day, she told Russia Today that Qatar had launched a “media war” to topple Mr. Assad.
She also claimed in that interview that a BBC report from the town of Zabadani that day, which showed that it was under rebel control, was false because, she said, she had driven there the night before and was told by Syrian forces that there were no rebels. Despite the fact that the BBC report featured Jeremy Bowen, a vastly experienced correspondent, in Zabadani, Ms. Phelan provided no video of her own journey to support her claim that the British network — which is state-financed but editorially independent — was wrong. (My colleague Kareem Fahim also visited Zabadani the next day and reported from there that Syrian troops had indeed withdrawn from the town, leaving it in rebel hands.)
In a recent conversation with The Lede, Ms. Phelan defended her work for the Russian and Iranian government channels, which she says are immune to the “Western cultural imperialism,” that drives British and American news organizations, including The Times and the BBC, bent “criminalizing independent and sovereign states of the global south like Iran, like the government of Ahmadinejad, like Syria, like Venezuela, like China, like Russia.” She also scoffed at the notion that it was her responsibility to provide evidence to support her claim that a French journalist, Gilles Jacquier, was killed by rebel shelling in Homs last month while on a government-guided media tour.
In the interview Ms. Phelan, who had elected not to take part in that tour of Homs, repeated several assertions she made in a report for Press TV and on her personal blog about the circumstances of Mr. Jacquier’s death that contradicted the accounts of journalists who were present when he was killed. Pressed on the source of her information, Ms. Phelan did admit that her account of Mr. Jacquier’s death was based in part on an elaborate conspiracy theory published recently by the Voltaire Network, a Web site edited by a French intellectual who claims that the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington were staged by the United States.
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