British media must show it can rise to the occasion on issues closer to home
Opinion
Coverage of Syria showed our media can still mobilise journalistic resources to explain the significance of a foreign story. But it would be even better if it could also focus its attention on other ills facing society.
Every now and again, the British media sets aside a deep fascination with itself — with endless splashes on the behaviour of a cookery show presenter or the tireless search for ways to undermine the government — and does a damn good job of journalism.
Almost without exception, the media rose to the unexpected news about how quickly the most brutal of dictatorships can collapse almost overnight.
From the Financial Times, The Times and The Guardian to Metro, the Daily Mail and Daily Express, they all gave proper weight and attention to the fall of Bashar al-Assad of Syria and his exile to Russia.
Comprehensive coverage
According to The Times, as Assad was packing his bags, Syrian state television was playing Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake on a loop while the president was said to be attending to “constitutional tasks” — which, in a way, he was.
The BBC did well by smartly getting its Middle East correspondent Lina Sinjab, a Syrian citizen, into the capital Damascus, where her description of seeing piles of discarded Syrian uniforms told you all you needed to know about the fate of the regime. In the end, no-one was willing to risk their lives fighting for Assad any more.
By the BBC’s lunchtime news on Monday, its Verify team was out checking the accuracy of video images from inside the prison where thousands have been held and tortured — a prison that horrifyingly came with its own nearby crematorium.
The Daily Mail even produced a “special edition” that provided comprehensive coverage of everyone involved, what is likely to happen next and the rebel commander behind it all — the Syrian leader-in-waiting, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, who at the moment has a $10m bounty on his head.
Its leading, sensible columnist — the one who is not Boris Johnson — provided the strategic insight that 7 October 2023, “when Hamas terrorists surged across the Gaza-Israel border to carry out a barbarous killing spree of innocent civilians”, has been the precursor to a fundamental redrawing of the balance of power in the Middle East.
The biggest loser, apart from perhaps Russia, will be the ayatollahs of Iran.
As Andrew Neil concluded: “I do not claim the ayatollahs are yet tottering. But they never have been more vulnerable. The smell of regime change is in the air.”
Neil might yet be surprised by how prescient he has been.
And in other news…
There are always outliers and not every national newspaper thought the collapse of the Assad regime was the most important story of the day.
For some reason, the Daily Star thought the fact that it might be windy on Christmas Day was of greater significance. The Daily Mirror splashed on a story about how a teenager with terminal cancer was helped to fulfil some of her dreams by Princess Kate.
The Sun just about passed muster with a small box — “Evil Assad’s fled to Vlad” — on a front page otherwise dominated by the “horror” car crash and broken leg of West Ham striker Michail Antonio.
Inside, though, there was perfectly good coverage of the “downfall of the devil” and what it might mean for international relations.
Closer to home
Overall, it’s a tribute to the way mainstream media can still mobilise journalistic resources from a standing start to both tell and explain the significance of a foreign story that could presage further falling dominos of dictatorship.
It would be even better if the media was also able to focus its attention, and resources, on some of the other ills facing society, such as the impact of climate change, the continuing folly of Brexit and, in the case of the UK, an increasingly polarised society that threatens to undermine democracy from the inside.
A good place to start would be a careful look at a report out this week by Dame Sara Khan, the government’s former counter-extremism tsar. Any weakening of social cohesion and failing faith in institutions provides “a permissive environment” for extremism to grow.
Khan found that, based on surveys, out of 28 democratic countries only the US was more politically divided than the UK and trust in the media was lowest here.
One stat is particularly worrying: 45% said they almost never trust the government to put the nation’s interests first. That’s up from 23% only four years ago.
Is that an issue of the actual behaviour of politicians or how that behaviour is reported?
Question of trust
The question is perhaps barely helpful. Measures of trust in the media, or lack of it, need to be taken with a pinch of salt.
Trust compared with what? The unmediated outpourings of TikTok?
Perceptions may also not portray any sense of reality and, anyway, the media is not a single entity, except in the minds of conspiracy theorists.
However, a central finding of Khan’s review is that what she terms “freedom-restricting harassment” has become widespread and “is corroding both social cohesion and our democratic rights and freedoms”.
It ranges from “intimidating and censoring journalists, those working in the arts and culture sector, to academics and teachers, as well as non-governmental organisations and those engaged in civil society”.
Victims range across politics, class, belief and cultural spectrums, and 60% of respondents believe it to be worse than five years ago.
While it is great to see coverage of the fall of a foreign dictatorship, it is a relatively uncontentious topic to cover, even if not always safe for the individual journalists involved.
Let’s have more difficult coverage of the ills afflicting UK society and if mainstream media is even inadvertently responsible for the rise of freedom-restricting harassment, it should desist.
In the end, it is indeed a matter of trust.
Raymond Snoddy is a media consultant, national newspaper columnist and former presenter of NewsWatch on BBC News. He writes for The Media Leader on Wednesdays — bookmark his column here.