Syria Op-Ed: How the Assad Regime Wins the Propaganda War as It Kills Civilians

 "At the end of the day, a Western journalist cannot do much fact checking, since traveling to Syria is far too dangerous, right?If the latter assertion is true, the former is false. There is a steady stream of daily information and years of footage that has come out of Syria. There are still trusted media activists who can do the fact-checking for journalists. However, that takes effort amid lots of noise and few clear signals. Far easier, facing a deadline, to take the easy route and grab a dramatic if often unsupported assertion from the monitoring group, Syrian State media, or the Islamic State.So Syrian rebels, communities, local coordination committees, and individuals — who four years ago had high hopes about world-wide media coverage and took great personal risks to support journalists reporting on the Syrian Revolution — do not reach out any more. They are disappointed and frustrated by a world and a media who, after the hype of the early months, forgot about the mass killing that the Assad regime still commits each day — a world and a media who turned away from the 11 to 12 million Syrians, 50% of the pre-conflict population, displaced when a dictator declared war on his people."