"American Misconceptions of Syria"
Download PDF About the AuthorFeras Aboukhater is a third-year undergraduate student with a Biology major and a minor in Medicine, Health, and Society at SUNY Stony Brook University. He wrote this research paper for his WRT 102 class in his freshman year. Feras plans to go into medical school when he is done with his undergraduate degree and he aspires to become a Cardiologist. ContentsHow Fox News Frames the War in Syria What Living in Safe Parts of Syria Looks Like Balancing Between Conflict and Peace |
Symptoms and CausesThe misunderstanding by Americans towards Syria and the Syrian people is a problem that emerged seven years ago due to the one-sided and incomplete story that US media outlets present about the war in Syria, especially TV channels like Fox News. Why does this misunderstanding persist and proliferate? You just need to ask yourself this question: “What do I know about Syria?” Your answer would prove to you that there is a problem. The fact that Americans know little to nothing about Syria other than war and destruction deprives this country of its historical importance and great cultural effect on the world. It also acts as an immense burden on every single Syrian citizen living in the US because of their responsibility to change this limited view towards Syria and Syrians. Hornero Gil de Zúñiga et al. argue in “Selective Exposure to Cable News and Immigration in the U.S.: The Relationship between FOX News, CNN, and Attitudes toward Mexican Immigrants” that cable television has drastically affected people’s attitude towards immigration during the last two decades. They provide the example that many conservative Republicans who watch Fox News show less support for Mexican immigration than others who have different political views. Fox News has always been linked with negative perceptions of Mexican immigration, and that shows the big correlation between those perceptions and the views of people watching this TV channel. Lyse Doucet agrees with Gil de Zúñiga et al. about the media’s effect on people, and in “Syria and the CNN Effect: What Role Does the Media Play in Policy-Making?" she gives an example about President Trump, who decided to make an airstrike on Syria after seeing photographs of dead children on TV. Referring to photographs, Heide Fehrenbach and Davide Rodogno write in “‘A Horrific Photo of a Drowned Syrian Child’: Humanitarian Photography and NGO Media Strategies in Historical Perspective” about how a horrific picture of a drowned three-year-old Syrian refugee child had a great effect on people from all around the world, presenting the history of using images and photography to get sympathy from people and fundraise for humanitarian organizations. In “Visual Framing of the Syrian Conflict in News and Public Affairs Magazines,” Keith Greenwood and Joy Jenkins show how TV channels like Fox News and CNN always focus on presenting war images, destruction, and bloodshed in international conflicts, and they give the Syrian conflict as a great example. They also question whether Americans know what is actually going on in Syria or just what is presented on TV. Fox News has a section for Syria on its website; however, not a single article or video talks about normal life in Syria. Some examples are obvious from their titles, like “Trapped in Syria's besieged Ghouta: ‘life has ceased, the children are waiting to die’” or “ISIS slaughters 33 young men in Syria with sharp tools,” and the list continues. This framing of Syria in Fox News cannot be challenged by Americans because, as Lauren Feldman shows in “Partisan Differences in Opinionated News Perceptions: A Test of the Hostile Media Effect,” people perceive bias in opinionated news; however, this perception depends on the person’s view towards the news. Americans don’t have any opinion towards what’s going on in Syria before watching TV, and that’s what makes it hard for them to perceive the bias. Rico Neumann and Shahira Fahmy show in “Measuring Journalistic Peace/War Performance: An Exploratory Study of Crisis Reporters Attitudes and Perceptions” that conflict reporting can be separated into two categories: peace journalism and war journalism. This completes what Keith Greenwood and Joy Jenkins were saying about the focus of TV channels on war and destruction and gives an alternative path for TV channels to take concerning international conflict and war. An example of peace journalism that I will discuss in more detail in this paper can be seen in Anne Barnard’s “Damascus Diary: A Syrian City Filled with Life, and Hints of Brutal Death,” which talks about the normal life in Damascus despite the war and proves that there is normal life in Syria, but this life is never shown to Americans on TV channels like Fox News.
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