ABC editorial bias for ‘revolution’ in Syria and its implications

Jan 5, 2025
Closeup of Ruffled Syria Flag, Syria Flag Blowing in Wind.

If only for Australia’s own security concerns, the strict application of ABC Editorial Policies in regard to Syria is vitally important. For the ABC to display bias for radical Islamist groups cannot bode well for us. It contravenes Australian beliefs and values meant to unite us.
[This text below is a complaint sent to the ABC on 23 December 2024.]

After the start of the “Arab Spring” in Syria, ABC reporting on Syria exhibited a blatant bias towards insurgents intent on overthrowing the Syrian Government. Such breaching of ABC Standards continues.

In the ABC TV news report “Syrians return to areas destroyed by the Assad regime” (16 December 2024), Eric Tlozek presents a single point of view on two critically contentious issues, namely the overthrow of the Assad Government in Syria by Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, a group proscribed as terrorist by our government; and the alleged sarin gas attack on 21 August 2013 in Ghouta, Damascus, an incident that President Obama was advised could have been a false flag committed by insurgents.

When Syan Vallance introduced Tlozek’s report on ABC Victoria, she declared: “… with the Assad regime gone, there is hope for the future.” Perhaps, she was simply echoing Tlozek, when he said: “…residents are now starting to contemplate a future free from fear”.

However, Tlozek ignores the reasons many people in Syria (a country with a diverse, mostly liberal population unused to morality police) have to greatly fear the agendas and violence of the rebel and foreign jihadi groups (including “jihadists” from Xinjiang, China). They ignore, for example, Syrians opposed not only to the Assad Government, but also to the militarisation of the opposition and the Islamisation of the political system.

Vallance and Tlozek’s positive comments do not present news with ‘due impartiality’, and so breach ABC Standard 4.1.

From such comments and Tlozek’s report itself, ABC viewers might reasonably conclude that the “rebels” now in control of Damascus were benign “moderates”.

However, the “rebel” predecessors to HTS, were responsible for killing hundreds, if not thousands, of civilians in Damascus by firing mortars at residential areas, abducting people, and detonating bombs.

One such mortar attack was reported by the ABC: 15 students in a Damascus University cafeteria were killed.

Another was reported by BBC’s Lyse Doucet from Damascus: four pupils and their school-bus driver were killed by mortars that fell on a mainly Christian area.

A Los Angeles Times article reported that “five musicians were killed and others were wounded” when showing up to rehearsal became a “deadly prospect” because the Damascus Opera House was “in range of missiles and mortars”.

Criminality was rife. When an Orthodox priest acted as an intermediary for the family of a kidnap victim, the kidnappers abducted, tortured and killed the priest.

In 2013, after the elderly Sunni imam Sheik al-Buti and 41 students were killed by a suicide bomber, the bias in the ABC report of their murders displayed a lack of respect for the esteemed Sunni scholar. Yet, it could be claimed the cleric’s assassination pointed to a clash between a scholarly, Sufi form of Islam prevalent in Syria and a more fundamentalist form of Islam exemplified by clerics from Saudi Arabia, for example, and the prominent Egyptian cleric Sheik Qaradawi connected to the Muslim Brotherhood.

The extremist ideology espoused by the numerous rebel groups, such as ISIS, Jabhat al-Nusra and the Free Syrian Army, was on display in August 2013 when about 200 civilians were brutally murdered and the same number abducted. The victims were Alawite villagers.

This atrocity was detailed by Human Rights Watch, and then picked up by the BBC, but I could find no evidence of the ABC reporting it.

Other aspects of the war not reported by the ABC included the thousands of Christians who fled Homs when insurgents established a base there, and the fatwas issued by extremist clerics permitting the rape of non-Sunni women.

ABC reports didn’t deny there were extremists among the various insurgent groups. Nevertheless, ABC programs maintained a general bias towards so-called moderate rebels even when such rebels co-operated with extremist groups when it suited them – as it did in the sectarian attack on Alawite villages.

In what seems to be a perverse editorial decision, ABC management allowed its correspondents to extol the so-called revolution in Syria and to eschew analysis, impartiality and the presentation of a range of perspectives. It’s perverse because ABC bias for what are basically radical Islamist militias could potentially foster sectarianism and extremism in our own community.

Today, we must assume ABC management approves Tlozek’s reports on Syria even though “open-mindedness” — a hallmark of impartiality and good journalism — is missing in his reporting.

Tlozek’s reports from Damascus present crowds of people celebrating and looking hopeful. Some of them may support the agenda of HTS. However, many might be simply feeling elation as they hope now that the suffocating US-led sanctions that had impoverished up to 90% of the population will be lifted, and life will become more bearable.

The impact of the sanctions and the US occupation of resource-rich northeast Syria are aspects of the war that Tlozek ignores, and so ABC viewers are led to believe the joy simply relates to the removal of Assad.

Tlozek makes no effort to seek diverse perspectives as required by ABC Standard 4.2 to ensure “no significant strand of thought or belief within the community is knowingly excluded or disproportionately represented”.

The concerns of a significant strand of thought in Australia itself is ignored by Tlozek: Syrian Australian women — whether they are Sunni or Shia Muslims, Christians, Druze, or non-believers — who believe a secular state could best ensure the rights and freedoms of Syrian women and religious minorities.

They might justifiably consider the phrase “the Assad regime” to be a catch-cry, a red herring, used by ABC journalists to distract ABC audiences from the underlying causes of Syria’s war and from rebel violence and sectarianism.

By ignoring the perspectives of such Syrian Australian women, who would see no reason to “hope for the future” of Syria now that HTS is in charge and that hardline foreign jihadists aligned with HTS are roaming freely in Syria, Tlozek’s report breaches ABC standards.

Tlozek further breaches ABC standards in this report when he goes to Ghouta, on the outskirts of Damascus.

Referring to the alleged sarin gas attack in Ghouta on 21 August 2013, Tlozek explains that “multiple international investigations determined rockets filled with deadly sarin gas were fired” at Ghouta, “killing hundreds of people”.

Tlozek doesn’t name the international investigations, so it is not possible to check their funding, professionalism or biases.

Although the Australian Government maintains that Syrian Government forces were responsible for the alleged sarin gas attack, in a 2017 Sydney Morning Herald article, Canberra journalist, Paul Malone recommended scepticism. He quoted Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh, who had reported that US intelligence knew it wasn’t just the Syrian Government that had access to sarin gas: some insurgent groups did, also.

More importantly, Molane writes, “Pentagon analysts had concluded that the sarin that was recovered wasn’t the kind of sarin in the Syrian arsenal”.

Presumably, Malone did quite a lot of research on the alleged chemical weapons attack, and so he would have noted that President Obama had been cautioned by James Clapper, then director of National Intelligence, that the intelligence on Syria’s use of sarin gas was not a “slam dunk”.

When there was a possibility that Obama would order military strikes against Damascus, former US Congressman Denis Kucinich, an anti-war activist, warned against it, saying America would be acting as Al-Qaeda’s airforce.

Still, hundreds of people, including scores of children, were killed in Damascus in August 2013. Who were they? Who killed them? How were they killed and why?

Had, in the past nine years, ABC journalists been briefed to apply their journalism skills and ethics to research the alleged sarin gas attack, Tlozek would have been obliged to caution viewers about  Mohammad’s claims.

In conclusion, Tlozek’s report breaches ABC standards in an unconscionable manner with ABC editorial approval, presumably. The issues raised in his report are extremely contentious and yet he treats them in a very off-hand way. His 16 December report contravenes the ABC’s statutory duty to be impartial and to present diverse sources of reliable information and contending opinions. His report doesn’t adequately equip its audiences to make up their own minds on the situation in Syria.

According to ABC Editorial Principles, the ABC takes no editorial stance other than its “commitment to fundamental democratic principles including the rule of law, freedom of speech and religion, parliamentary democracy and non-discrimination”. These principles are flouted in Tlozek’s report which presents a bias for the “revolution” despite signs that it’s leading to the curbing of freedoms for women and minorities, increased criminality and sectarian violence.

ABC reporting on Syria is an example of cognitive dissonance that would confuse and disorient many Australians.

If only for Australia’s own security concerns, the strict application of ABC Editorial Policies in regard to Syria is vitally important. For the ABC to display bias for radical Islamist groups cannot bode well for us. It contravenes Australian beliefs and values meant to unite us.

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