Reality on the Ground: Exploring News Production Practices by Syrian Journalists in Times of Conflict

ABSTRACT

While most research on the Syrian revolution has been focussing on content analysis about how Western mainstream media cover and frame the conflict, this paper aims at exploring journalistic practices by Syrian journalists. We look at three concrete aspects: the socio-labor profile of the practitioners and their circumstances, the dynamics of journalistic practices when covering the war and the perception of “objectivity” when doing so. A mixed method approach is employed in this study through a survey, answered by 86 Syrian journalists, and semi-structured interviews with 12 practitioners to enrich the data. Participants are members or collaborators of SIRAJ (Syrian Investigative Reporting for Accountability Journalism). The concept of “communities of interpretation” has been adopted to fit the role and work of both “professional” and “citizen journalists” within the sample. Findings show that local journalists, a heterogeneous group of different socio-labor backgrounds, have a preference for humanitarian topics, stories about conflicts between the government and the opposition, as well as the international global consequences of the conflict. On the other hand, there is an important gap between practitioners “positive” perceptions about their ability to achieve “objectivity” and the practical constraints they encounter when working in such extraordinarily difficult and risky circumstances.

KEYWORDS:

• Journalism
• Syria
• conflict
• sources
• objectivity
• news production

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 To also contest the term “objectivity”, in this paper we will use it in quotation marks.

2 An alliance of Sunni Islamist formed by 19 different rebel groups some of which were previously affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood of Syria.

3 Also called People’s Defense Units, this is a mainly-Kurdish militia in Syria and the primary component of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). The militia mostly consists of ethnic Kurds, but also includes Arabs and foreign volunteers.