Strong evidence of distortion in media’s portrayal of Syrian invasion

Some of you may have read recently (source, source, source, source, source, source, source) that the United States broke international law on Sunday by violating the sovereignty of a UN member nation (Syria) without the necessary UN sanction and without the appropriate legal and moral criteria necessary to justify such an attack without UN sanction.

As an exercise, I decided to look at how the mainstream U.S. media covered the incident. For the purposes of this exercise, I took mainstream media to consist of: CNN, FOX News, LA Times, Washington Post, NPR, USA Today, NY Times¹ and Time Magazine.

At approximately 4pm this afternoon, I conducted a google news search on the issue and filtered out all U.S. mainstream publications who had written on the issue of the U.S.’s illegal raid into Syria. The following pieces were generated by Google and the results of what they are saying to the American populace is frightening.²

Some Key Distortions:

Of the nine unique pieces put forth by the U.S. mainstream media, 8 of the 9 fail to mention that there were several reports of children being killed by the U.S. attack. The only piece to mention the alleged killing of children was FOX News and they mentioned it only to discredit such claims.

Of the nine unique pieces, 3 questioned whether the raid even took place (usually describing the incident as “Syrian claims”).

Of the nine pieces, not one mentions the illegality of the raid (although one does mention one quoted source’s opinion that the raid could be a violation of U.S.-Iraqi bilateral agreements).

Of the nine pieces, only three highlight the legitimate grievances of the Syrian government.

Yet, every single one of the nine pieces mention “foreign fighters” or attacks against Iraq as legitimate justification for crossing border and launching an attack on Syrian civilians.

Below is a graphical representation of the distortion of the event by the mainstream U.S. media.³

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Notes:

¹ Google News Search did not generate any pieces at 4pm for the New York Times.

² The titles of some of the listed articles have changed since the data was scraped from Google News. The hyperlinks generated by Google News and listed above are unchanged as are the article headlines. Any change in article headlines between what is listed above and what is linked to is a result of the publication in question changing the title sometime between 4pm and 9:35pm EDT.

³ While the articles themselves were scraped from Google News at 4pm, the analysis of the content of each article did not take place until 9pm EDT and thus the analysis above does take into account any changes in text which may have occurred between 4pm and 9:35pm EDT.

It should also be noted here that this post was originally going to be about the distortion of the Syrian incident as seen by the North American mainstream media rather than merely the American media. However, at 4pm EDT Google News failed to generate any mainstream Canadian news publications that filed their own reports on the invasion (i.e. did not just buy a wire service report).