Many of us feel a stake in the Syrian civil war, and are appalled by the daily violence reported through our domestic news channels. But is our media really explaining the conflict to us, or are we as ill-informed and misguided as before the war started? Rodger Shanahan from the Lowy Institute investigates.

There have been many notable failings in the Western media's coverage of Syria over the last few years. While Joan Juliet Buck's hagiography of Asma al-Assad for US Vogue ('A Rose in the Desert') probably tops the list, how good is the rest of our news?

We hear reports on the conflict happening in Syria almost everyday. While we might think we are engaged with what’s happening, are we really able to take informed action on the basis of what's reported?

The answer is realistically 'No'.

It's difficult to make predictions about issues as complex as the Syrian civil war. Unlike Libya or Tunisia, Syria is strategically far more important, involves a more complex ethnic and religious social mix, presents different geographic challenges, and has an incumbent regime that has retained powerful allies.

Which is why the way that the media has represented the situation in that country has often been at odds with the reality.

While there's a litany of issues on which the Western media has by and large misread the Syrian civil war, there's at least three main points that news outlets seem to get consistently wrong.

False assumption 1: The Syrian regime was a narrowly-based sectarian autocracy that lacked popular support.

That the key levers of power, and important military command positions, were largely held by the minority Alawite community is true. But the regime still enjoyed a not insignificant level of support from Christians and the Sunni urbanised middleclass. While the sectarian nature of the conflict is plain to see, much of the early armed opposition came from those in rural communities such as Idlib and Deraa, with whom urbanised Sunnis have little in common. The gradual Islamisation of elements of the opposition alienated other parts of Syrian society from the uprising.

The Western media have spent lots of time reporting from the rebel side, so the story was skewed to their narrative. Yet the lack of spontaneous uprisings in major population centres indicated a level of passive, if not active support for the regime.

Through all of this, nobody in the West stopped to ask the question 'How popular is Assad in Syria ?'

There was a widespread belief that Assad needed to go and be replaced by the opposition, without looking at what the alternative was or how much support Assad had. The Western media have spent lots of time reporting from the rebel side, so the story was skewed to their narrative. Yet the lack of spontaneous uprisings in major population centres indicated a level of passive, if not active support for the regime. For many Syrians, the contrasts between urban and rural, Sunni and non-Sunni, Islamist and secular have made supporting the regime less unpalatable than many in the West realise.

False assumption 2: The US simply needs to intervene to stop the killing.

In addressing the Syria issue, President Obama has only had bad choices available to him. But people only needed to read his speech opposing the invasion of Iraq to realise that this was a Commander-in-Chief who was not trigger happy, and needed to be sure that US military intervention would resolve the situation. And in Syria there has never been that certainty.

Obama has spent his first term extricating the US from two wars and he has no desire spending his second term engaged militarily in Syria. Those most vocal in calling for military intervention have been the least forthcoming in saying what form that should take or what it should achieve. The Syrian military has significant artillery and rocket capabilities so a no-fly zone will just mean they use land-based indirect fire systems more frequently. There is also no guarantee that arming the opposition will do anything other than increase the number of people who are killed, and there is no way that anybody can guarantee that such weapons will go to the ‘right’ people unless the US controls every step in the supply chain, including in-country.

In the bigger picture, the US had no influence in Syria prior to the uprising. So given that Iran and Russia have proven steadfast in their support of Assad, Washington can have Syria bleed Tehran and Moscow while the US maintains the same influence it had in Syria before the crisis. That Obama sees Syria as less a priority than many other conflicts was evident in an interview he gave in January this year. Obama pointed out that tens of thousands of people are being killed in the Congo and he is under no pressure to intervene there, and yet he is under immense pressure to intervene in Syria where the outcomes are uncertain. Syria is not as important to Washington as many would like to think.

False assumption 3: The opposition forces are champions of democracy and should be supported.

The government of Bashar Assad is a brutal autocratic (or even oligarchic) regime. The problem is that the opposition has not shown itself deserving of taking its place. It has been singularly incapable of organising itself so that it's seen to be inclusive and democratic. They have only coalesced when forced to do so by external actors, and even then temporarily. If the opposition are unable to achieve a degree of unity when there is every reason to do so, then what hope will there be if the spoils of victory came their way?

The opposition have limited control over the fighters in Syria, who despair of the infighting taking place amongst the political representatives. Not only is the self-interest the fault of the individuals; many of their external supporters have followed their own interests rather than seek a unified front against Assad. Non-democracies such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar have their own conflicting interests in supporting the opposition, but spreading democratic values and inclusiveness are not high on their list of priorities.

While there are individuals within the opposition who seek individual freedoms and the same political outcomes that the West’s political leaders espouse, regional states’ motives have largely meant that these voices have been drowned out by those who seek the support of countries they believe they can rely on in the future. For all their talk of supporting the wishes of the Syrian people, regional states have once again demonstrated that they have only one interest; self interest.

Dr Rodger Shanahan is a non-resident fellow at the Lowy Institute for International Policy. This morning he appears on a panel discussion about the Syrian civil war on Life Matters.