Fifty shades of obfuscation

What's new with our Syrian freedom fighters this morning? Depends a lot on where you read about it.

Here's a random selection from the "breaking news" page of various major news websites.

At the NYT there's no news from Syria, but they've got a couple of scary stories from Iran.

At the Washington Post the only news from Syria is a story about the story behind the recent defection of the Prime Minister.

When we get to USA Today we learn that there's action on the ground in Aleppo. "Clashes rage in rebel bastions." The Toronto Star has the same headline.

At the BBC the fight is not so much raging as over. "Rebels lose key district of Aleppo."

The French site France 24 has the rebels "withdraw" from key district, which I gather is not the same as losing the key district.

At Deutsche Welle there's nothing to report on Syria beyond that "Syrian's suffer from lack of food, safety, medicine." Oh, and they want you to know that the German development minister is in Africa touting a peace plan for Mali that will by-pass both the rebels and the Islamists.

The Beirut Star has no news from Aleppo but is the only site so far to inform me that a boatload of Syrian refugees has arrived in Italy.

Jazeera informs us that the rebels have retreated from parts of Aleppo under heavy fire, but it was a strategic retreat. They have a plan to regroup and counter-attack. Jazeera has its bills paid by the same paymasters as the Syrian Free Army, so one can safely assume that this is putting the best possible spin on some unpleasant realities on the ground.

In Israel all eyes seem to be on the Sinai at the moment.

And from Iran Press TV wants us to know that the Syrian army is killing more insurgents. We are not told if the insurgents are killing more soldiers.

When we throw all that in a pot, what can we figure out? When some of the bigger war cheerleaders don't mention Aleppo at all, after having spent days telling us that the decisive battle of the war was about to unfold, we can assume it's not going well for "our" side.

Ditto for the "clashes rage" angle coming from some others.

When the BBC and AJE tell us the rebels are losing ground, you can be sure that they're suffering severe setbacks.

I'll predict that the next wave of stories from our mainstream news rebel cheerleaders will focus on atrocities comitted by the Syrian army in Aleppo.

Brit Foreign Secretary wags finger of righteousness at Syrian torturers

William Hague mounted the white horse of moral outrage to lecture Syria about the evils of torture today.

The occasion was the release of a report from Human Rights Watch documenting wide-spread torture in Syria.

It is well know that after 9/11 Syria was a popular destination for the Nations of Virtue to send suspects for "interrogation". Seems we knew all along that interrogators in Syria have a little more leeway than they have in Canada or the US or Britain.

Times have changed, don't you know. Not that long ago we were out-sourcing torture to Syria.

Now we're outsourcing civil war, and since we're on the side of freedom and democracy in that civil war, it's important to shout loudly about how repugnant it is that the Assad regime stoops to torture..

Political grandstanding at its finest!

Why it's so easy to scoop the New York Times

Even for “pot-addled hillbillies”.

And not just the Times of course, or the Globe or Reuters.

You see, it’s not that they’ve been “scooped,” it’s just that they choose to ignore certain stories.

Here’s a fine example. For almost a year major American media outlets reported the fiction that the conflict in Syria consisted of the Syrian military on the one side and “unarmed protesters” on the other. Then in February CNN aired video that had come to it via the BBC that showed a completely different reality.

Suddenly the “unarmed” protesters were very well armed indeed. Who knew?

The very networks and news sites who had failed to pass this news on to the news consumers obviously knew, but chose not to share the information. The information that the Syrian opposition was armed from the beginning of the uprising was readily available on news sites from Turkey, Russia, and Iran among others.

So why did so many media outlets suppress this crucial aspect of the story? Because it doesn’t fit into the over-arching narrative, which requires an evil dictator on the one side and innocent victims on the other, just like in Libya.

The purpose of this “news” isn’t so much to inform us of what’s going on; it’s to groom us for the next “humanitarian intervention”.

Similarly, coverage of the never-ending eurobaloney crisis has it’s own not unrelated narrative, and the “news” we are permitted is all about how the irresponsible over-spending under-working Greeks are the authors of their own misfortune and only a strong dose of neo-liberal tough love can save them.

It simply wouldn’t do to write stories about how the same clutch of  financial wizards who profited every step of the way while Greece was running up huge debts continue to profit from these supposed “bail-outs”.

So these “scoops” aren’t scoops at all. If our news media were about delivering news I’m sure they know where to find these stories.

But they’re in the business of propaganda.