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Patrick Cockburn writes for the Independent. His latest book, published last year, is The Age of Jihad.
Who supplies the news?
Patrick Cockburn on misreporting in Syria and Iraq
The nadir of
Western media coverage of the wars in Iraq and Syria has been the
reporting of the siege of East Aleppo, which began in earnest in July
and ended in December, when Syrian government forces took control of the
last rebel-held areas and more than 100,000 civilians were evacuated.
During the bombardment, TV networks and many newspapers appeared to lose
interest in whether any given report was true or false and instead
competed with one another to publicise the most eye-catching atrocity
story even when there was little evidence that it had taken place. NBC
news reported that more than forty civilians had been burned alive by
government troops, vaguely sourcing the story to ‘the Arab media’.
Another widely publicised story – it made headlines everywhere from the Daily Express to the New York Times
– was that twenty women had committed suicide on the same morning to
avoid being raped by the arriving soldiers, the source in this case
being a well-known insurgent, Abdullah Othman, in a one-sentence quote
given to the Daily Beast.
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