How Pictures Shape the Story in Syria

The Role of a Photojournalist in Shaping the Syrian Narrative

Summary

This paper discusses the role of the photojournalist in shaping the Syrian narrative. The images that photojournalists create are used by a variety of media outlets, both mainstream like CNN and alternative like social media uploaders, to develop a narrative that promotes a perspective on events and advocates for a reaction from the public—either support for intervention or condemnation of the use of force by governments that are not directly involved in the conflict. The paper examines the gassing incident at Khan Shaykhun in Syria to see how photojournalism played a part in shaping the responses of the American president. It also examines how spectacle, soft power, embedded reporting, interventionism and the CNN effect all play a part in shaping the narrative built on the work of photojournalists.

The paper also discusses the impact of photojournalism in the Digital Age where the citizen journalists of today are also growing thanks to having the power to record and take images on their phones and share them with the wider world instantaneously via the Internet and the social media platforms like YouTube and Facebook. This also goes into shaping the narrative based on the images provided by photojournalists, as the technological citizenship also acts as their own photojournalists, whether they are witnesses with cameras at the London bombing, or in Syria witnessing the conflict in that war-torn state. The role of the photojournalist is shown to be an important one in how the narrative of conflict, in particularly the Syrian conflict, is developed and spread by the opposing voices in media—from the institutionalized media to the up and coming alternative or social media.
Introduction

In the social media, video and image sharing world of the Digital Age, a picture tells a thousand words and travels at a thousand miles per click of the mouse. Photos play an enormous role in shaping the way people think, react, what they believe to be true, and how they feel about particular issues. This is particularly true when it comes to shaping a narrative about war, and especially true in the case of the role of the photojournalist in shaping the Syrian narrative. Syria has been an especially active region in the Middle East, with a number of countries, mercenaries, terrorist groups, weapons, and vested interests converging on the scene for a host of reasons ranging from destabilizing the current regime to supporting it. Turkey, Russia, Kurds, Iran, Saudi Arabia, ISIS, Israel, the U.S.—all have been on the scene for a number of years, and the stories told about what is happening there are as wide ranging and conflicting as the players and parties involved themselves. For many, understanding what is going on on the ground depends on seeing images of attacks, atrocities, war torn regions, and heroics, captured on camera by photojournalists. President Trump, for instance, is on record saying that he was moved to strike a Syrian air base after seeing the horrible pictures of death that resulted from an alleged chemical attack. What really happened surrounding the events at Khan Shaykhun in Syria on April 4th, 2017, remains debated (De Noli, 2017)—but the pictures spoke volumes and allowed for easy or quick reactions to be provoked. This paper will analyze and discuss the role that the photojournalist plays in shaping the Syrian narrative and discuss how spectacle, soft power, interventionism, the CNN effect, and embedded reporting all impact and are impacted by the photojournalist’s role.

Framing the Narrative

The photojournalist frames an image and tells only a small minute, fragment of a story. He captures a second in time—a still image that tells of an instance of bravery, of courage, of hope, of disaster, of carnage, of desolation, of terror, of war. There is always a surrounding context to every picture, and many pictures can be taken out of this context and twisted around to purvey propaganda that simply does not align with the reality that exists outside the picture’s frame. One famous photo that sparked outrage during the Vietnam War was the image of a Viet Cong being executed by a South Vietnamese general. The picture only showed what appeared to be an ordinary citizen being killed by an authoritarian with a snub nosed pistol. The surrounding facts were not conveyed and told a much different story and reversed the trajectory of one’s sympathy when fully explained (Ruane, 2018). Nonetheless, the image was useful from a propaganda perspective because it helped to fuel the anti-war movement.
In the Syrian conflict, photojournalism is just as important in shaping a narrative. From pictures of the White Helmets (whose efforts have been documented in film and whose role has been questioned by those who look beyond the frame to see how organizations like this one are used as proxies to stir up conflict) to pictures of murdered Syrians and terrorists, photos tell a graphic story—that is then made into a much larger story depending on how the photos are used.

Spectacle is the primary driver of the photojournalism: the photo is meant to convey a sense of spectacle—of action—of drama. The spectacle can come in all shapes a sizes, whether it is a child crying, the aftermath of a bombing in London, or a row of terrorists formidably lined up with weapons of various power. The photojournalist captures the spectacle within the four frames of the camera—and the rest of the story is then told by journalists, reporters, propagandists, researchers, mainstream media, alternative media, social media, and so on. The number of voices riffing on the photo rises quickly into the tens of hundreds of thousands—a cacophony of voices that crescendos when the next spectacular image arrives; the previous narrative is dropped, the new one erected and propelled through headlines and talk show talking heads, senators, presidents and PMs. This is how the photojournalists’ images are co-opted through the use of soft power. The photojournalist may capture a sliver of truth—but those in the West with an aim towards interventionism, will take that sliver and twist it until it can be said to justify their aims. The photojournalist supplies the ammunition for the soft power to be made into hard power—into coercive power. The media drumbeats its conclusions based on images without ever getting the fact straight. The public is beaten into believing from non-stop repetition of the parrot-voices on the news networks—the CNN effect—that everything is exactly as the talking heads are saying it is, because they are the authorities, and they have shown you the pictures, and pictures do not lie; only sometimes they do—at least, sometimes they do not tell all the story—and those who promote interventionism can use the pictures to tell a story that supports their own aims.

In the case of Sarin and nerve gas attacks in Syria, the photos always show the aftermath—but never the situation beforehand (at least not those published by CNN). Trump’s attack on a Syrian airbase in early 2017 (Starr & Diamond, 2017) was an immediate knee-jerk response to photos of the aftermath of Syrians killed by gas; though the type of chemicals that killed were disputed and the origins of the gas (whether it was directed from Assad or the result of an explosion in an illegal chemical factory controlled by terrorists) was not yet clear. Nonetheless, the CNN effect went into immediate action and compelled President Trump to show that he was not going to let Assad get away with conducting chemical attacks. Trump’s somewhat muted reaction (firing missiles at a mostly empty airbase) was, in a way, representative of the emptiness of the narrative being propagated by CNN and the other Establishment news agencies in the West. But it shows how fabricated stories can be used with the help of images that are taken of the aftermath of an event in which people die and spun into a story that calls for military intervention.
Thus, in this sense interventionism, the CNN effect, soft power, and spectacle are all intertwined and interconnected (Robinson, 2002). The photojournalist covering alleged gas attacks is used and his material is broadcasted by the soft power forces to manipulate foreign policy—just as they did with Trump, who ran on the platform of fighting the terrorists in the Middle East—not Assad. As Al-Ghazzi (2017) notes, “the politically significant reverberations of false Syria reports offer lessons that address the debate in journalism studies about the place of reality in the news” (p. 12). Oftentimes this is the result of embedded journalism—journalists who are attached to military campaigns and report from directly on the ground. Brian Williams is famous for reporting lying about a helicopter crash in Iraq. He claimed “he was riding in a Chinook helicopter that came under R.P.G. fire and required an emergency landing” and he told the story on multiple occasions—for example, “on Friday’s NBC Nightly News, during a segment in which he honored the sergeant major who Williams claimed saved his life,” using pictures of the major to reinforce the narrative (Makarechi, 2015). The only problem was, none of it was true. Williams lied about the whole thing and, when called out for his lies by the by citizen journalism—i.e., the technological citizenship (people with access to more information and the sharing of information than ever before possible in the entire history of the human race, thanks to the technology of the Internet), Williams was suspended by his employer. In this case, citizen journalism came in the form of social media users—the actual soldiers who were on the helicopter that crashed and who had posted pictures of their story online for their Facebook friends and followers to see. They asserted that Williams only arrived on the scene after the event already occurred. Makarechi (2015) reports: “Other soldiers who were actually on the helicopter that was hit and performed an emergency landing posted on Facebook that they didn’t recall Williams or his crew being onboard. They said that Williams arrived approximately an hour after the formation had already landed. Williams promptly acknowledged that they were right, and recanted.” This is evidence of how photojournalism can actually swing both ways: it can be used to concoct stories that are not true and it can be used to verify accounts that are true. In this case, the actual soldiers who were on the helicopter could prove with pictures that they were there: Williams could not, and so, caught in the lie, he had to confess.

New Journalism

Citizen journalism is certainly on the rise as a result of two factors: 1) everyone having a camera and immediate access to the Internet today as a result of smart phone technology; and 2) the distrust that the majority of people have for the mainstream media. Indeed, the Easley (2017) reports that 65% of voters in the U.S. believe the mainstream media reports “fake news” consistently in order to craft a narrative that supports their policy—and their policy is by and large to shape foreign policy—i.e., the CNN effect, as Robinson (2002) points out, which began during the Cold War era and has continued on into the present. The shaping of foreign policy by way of news media is something that has given rise to the alternative media—the technological citizenship’s response to mainstream news media: armed and equipped with their own mobile phone devices, Internet connections, and the ability to make contact with people all over the world and do their own independent investigations, the citizen journalists of the world are able to communicate a separate narrative that oftentimes conflicts with the “official” story being peddled by “official” mainstream news outlets. With the London bombing, this was certainly the case, as eye witnesses recording what they saw with the phone cameras and uploaded these videos to popular social media sharing sites like YouTube and Facebook and helped the technological citizenship to craft their own narrative of what was unfolding, who was responsible, whether the incident was a false flag, how one could tell, and so on (Reading, 2011). In other words, it has become increasingly difficult as a result of all these factors to “control” a narrative with so many different players involved in the shaping of a story and so many new and different outlets. The fragmentation of news stories is actually equal to the perpetuation of the same themes over and over: the themes involve interventionism, soft power, false flags, and distrust.

This should not be surprising as most people are anti-war whereas foreign policy at least in the West is heavily influenced by hawks and lobbyists who stand to profit from warmongering, whether that is because they have plans for pipelines in the Middle East or because they are collaborating with foreign countries like Israel and Saudi Arabia to topple regimes that stand in the way of their plans for the Middle East. From this perspective, the citizen journalists clash with the mainstream news media, with each openly branding the other as “fake news”—and even the President of the United States gets involved in dolling out “fake news of the year” awards to fan the flames.

In this environment the role of the photojournalist becomes even more important because his photos serve as a nugget of information that can start a war if hurled in the wrong way. People have to track down the origins of the photo, put it in context, research the facts of the situation, talk to people on the ground at the scene, filter through all the politics, decide which NGOs (non-governmental organizations—that are usually surreptitiously governmental) are involved and what is going on behind the scenes—both in the reporting of a narrative and on the ground. In short, there is a lot to unpack in a single photo and the photojournalist snaps the image and essentially gives it to the world to do with it what it will.

This is not to say that the cultivators of narratives do not strive to get their own photojournalists out there to frame pictures that will help convey their side of the story they want to tell, either. For example, the Al Hurra news show was an attempt by the West to control a narrative in the Middle East, as Seib (2009) reports:

Al Hurra is owned by Middle East Television Network, a nonprofit corporation, with editorial policy set by the Broadcasting Board of Governors, a federal agency that also oversees the Voice of America. When it began broadcasting in February 2004 with a $62 million budget for its 1st year, Al Hurra received mixed reviews. (In late 2003, Congress added $40 million to the Al Hurra budget for a sister station broadcasting solely to Iraq.) Critics referred to it as Fox News in Arabic and noted its U.S.-grounded political leanings were obvious in semantic usages such as referring to coalition forces in Iraq rather than Al Jazeera’s preferred occupation forces (p. 776).

The way that Western media attempts to control a narrative within the nexus of the location where it is engaging in interventionism is indicative of its overall attempt to support foreign policy through diplomatic use of the news. It attempts to move people in foreign nations just as it does domestically.

Sinjab (2017) reports that this is the case anytime anyone reports in the Middle East. Her experiences as a journalist reporting on the Syrian conflict taught her that the flow of information, whether from the Syrian government, from other journalists, from soldiers, the military, the FSA, the terrorist organizations with their own ISIS publication that looks suspiciously Western and very professional, indicates that there are many flows of information that have to be considered before a story can be accepted as true or even as marginally truthful. Even journalists are attempting to understand the whole of events and how information is used to craft a narrative—from those supplying the information to those interpreting the information to those spreading the information through their own interpretive lens. Berry (2017) likewise confirms that context is very important when engaging in news communication and argues that “the lack of context is one of the most recurring features of the coverage” in the Western media with regard to conflicts in the Middle East—especially in regions like Syria and the Gaza Strip or West Bank.

Greenwood and Jenkins (2015) have found that photojournalism can also be used to bring a narrative to life in spite of the contentious forces surrounding the events, especially with regard to Syria. They argue that “international news is most often visually framed in terms of violence and disaster” (p. 207). The media sells news papers and clicks by publishing pictures of visceral content—disaster, war, famine, suffering: these draw eyeballs. Peace does not. Thus, “conflicts are visually framed in terms of the active participants and aftermath of battle instead of the affected bystanders or efforts to negotiate peace”—which are not as visceral by a long shot (Greenwood & Jenkins, 2015, p. 207). With regard to photojournalistic reports on the Syrian conflict, the narratives of the international media use the aftermath photos to tell a story that will bump up advertising revenue. Since the media is there to make money (usually), it will use sensationalistic aims—spectacle—to get people to buy the publication or watch the programming. The spectacle is what sells—the peace process does not offer the same jolt. Thus, to some degree, photojournalism plays a role of keeping the media afloat and in keeping the wars going. The aftermath of the chemical “attack” in Khan Shaykhun in the Idlib, Syria, was reported widely by photojournalists and their images helped to draw eyes to the media outlets who were more interested in shaping a story about what “must have” happened than in determining what really happened. And as Bentley (2017) notes, there is an air of irrationality about the entire proceedings and reaction around Khan Shaykhun that makes the response of Trump even more questionable than the events themselves.

All of this comes back to the question of soft power, interventionism, embedded reporting, spectacle, the CNN effect and the shaping of policy by way of media influence. Seib (2009) notes that “the effective exercise of soft power depends largely on its being a part of a comprehensive, well-designed public diplomacy effort” (p. 780). The well-designed public effort in the West to cast Assad as a villain in his own country—just as it did with Hussein in Iraq, Gaddafi in Libya, the Taliban in Afghanistan (where the poppy fields have now been liberated thanks to the U.S. invasion and the heroin trade allowed to proliferate exponentially), and as is currently underway with Iran, Russia, and any other country that opposes American foreign policy. The photojournalist plays an important role in this dynamic because his images shape the narrative; they are used by all players to shape public opinion; they are essential to framing a story. They provide the visceral shock in most cases, the launch pad from which the dramatic action of interventionism or defense is taken place.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the role of the photojournalist in shaping the Syrian conflict can primarily be seen in the way that the mainstream, international media and the alternative or social media citizen journalists use images to craft stories that convey their own particular side or perspective or take on the war there. One side constructs a narrative based on images that promotes a policy of interventionism—as seen in Trump’s response to the deaths of Syrians from chemicals in Khan Shaykhun in April 2017. The other side constructs a narrative that very often casts doubt on this policy of interventionism, claiming that the popular media’s narrative is fraudulent, based on inaccuracies, used to shape foreign policy in favor of the war state, deep state, intelligence agencies, foreign allies, etc. They use their own footage, their own phones, their own images, their own personal stories—like the soldiers in the downed helicopter that Williams said he was on when it crashed—to share with social media users their version of what happened. They develop narratives that insinuate that the mainstream or “official” narrative is part of a false flag story to instigate more fighting, more regime change, more policies that lead to more war, which sells more papers, and gets more contracts for government workers. In this milieu, the role of the photojournalist is pivotal: he is at the heart of warring narratives.

References

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