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Ed Webb's List: Syria media 2014

    • After reviewing more than 38 million Twitter posts about the Syrian conflict, a team of Middle East scholars from The George Washington University and American University concluded that rather than an objective account of what’s taken place, social media posts have been carefully curated to represent a specific view of the war. It said the skewing of the social media view of the conflict has been amplified by the way more traditional news outlets make use of the postings – for example, passing along social media posts written in English over those written in Arabic.

      The analysts studied tweets that mentioned Syria in English or Arabic from the start of 2011 through April 2013. They then analyzed how “traditional” forms of media, such as newspapers, used social media to supplement their coverage of the conflict.

    • Because journalists were largely unable to get direct access to the events in Syria at the start of the conflict, many relied on “citizen journalism,” or accounts from Syrians who said they’d witnessed events firsthand, often posted on social media, said Marc Lynch

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    • We've heard these pleas before. The BBC reports regularly from inside Syria, as do several American papers, and although coverage of the Syrian war is not wall-to-wall on American networks, it gets regular, consistent attention.

       

      So where is the public outrage about a war so chaotic and dangerous that even the UN has stopped keeping track of the death toll? Have we all become numb to the pain of others?

    • The world inevitably tires of complex, long conflicts where there are no clear answers about how to end the violence. This cartoon in the New Yorker is a harsh but perhaps accurate look at how the collective conscience deals with the relentless stream of bad news from Syria.

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    • My own work shows how mass cultural producers have worked through the state in an effort to reform the regime. I continue to view most of the drama creators with whom I worked as honest critics of dictatorship, given the high degree of dissatisfaction with the regime expressed to me in interviews and informal conversations. This criticism, often dismissed as a regime-sanctioned safety-valve mechanism, sincerely reflected the relatively progressive, secular politics of most TV makers themselves. The uprising has split the drama field, the majal al-fann; some artists have backed the opposition, others remain silent, and some support Bashar al-Asad. A handful of prominent actors—drama industry’s public face—have continually praised the leadership’s handling of the crisis. Yet most screenwriters and some directors—the industry’s “brains”—have embraced the opposition, or condemned the regime. Some have been arrested; at least one remains incarcerated.
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