There is a trend in journalism to extrapolate ideas from everyday life to explain the wider situation in a country. This isn’t itself a bad thing- human narratives are important and deserve to be heard. Human narratives can help the reader understand a specific situation and empathise or react accordingly. Some of my favourite reads have been based on human narratives- for example, “Searching for Othman” by Annie Slemrod the story of an Iraqi refugee child masterfully blends the personal experience of Othman and his family with the wider context of war, displacement and return in Iraq.

The problem with human narrative stories comes when the wider context is neglected whilst also purporting to portray that wider context. Two prime examples of these stories can be found in British media on Syria. On Sunday, the Guardian published a short article entitled “Syrian museum reopening hailed as ‘return to normal life’”. It tells of the National Museum in Damascus reopening, mentions a few experts in archaeology, but is generally thin on detail. Hailed by who? Why? What’s the agenda of the man hailing it? Does this tally up with the experience of others around the country? The article reveals it was the Syrian Minister of Culture who made the claim, Mohammed al-Ahmad, but it doesn’t try to support or question that narrative. Instead the narrative is left unchallenged, accepted at face-value. There is no discussion of how Syrian society has changed. No discussion of the massive issues facing most Syrians today, such as the pro-government militias kidnapping, looting and murdering with impunity, or millions of Syrians living under rebel control in the north, or the many thousands suffering in refugee camps like Rukban.

A similar piece written back in January 2018 by the BBC is titled “Rebuilding Aleppo: Life beyond Syria’s civil war”. The piece makes observations or conclusions about Syria as a whole, without talking about any other part of Syria aside from Aleppo. It tells us of the sadness of the city’s returned inhabitants at its current state, and their efforts to fix it, as well as the loyalty of the city and its people to Assad. If we were to extrapolate the ideas in this article to the wider situation, as the article and title suggests we should, we’d be under the impression Syria is collectively rebuilding, as one country, behind the Assad government.

There’s one standard piece that reappears, re-written by a new author, every few months, which tells of the Damascus bar. The Damascus bar and its inhabitants has become a journalistic cliché akin to Thomas Friedman’s taxi drivers. Where better to extrapolate the views and realities of the entire country, still amidst civil war, than one particular bar in Damascus?

The BBC published a piece like this entitled “Why I’m opening bars in Syria?” about a businessman who was having success in his bars in Damascus. Contrasting to The Canary’s “this gay bar in Damascus shows us the Syria that Western media outlets ignore”, this piece made no pretence to talk about Syria as a whole. It could have done with mentioning though that just miles away chemical weapons and mass-bombardment were used on those disloyal to Assad.

The problem here isn’t any specific falsehood- what the articles have reported is true- instead it’s a case of lying by omission. When the articles prime themselves as a tale about Syria at-large, and then tell the reader about a specific human narrative, we’re not being told the whole truth. Pieces like these can very easily become nothing more than pro-government propaganda, and unless told with a critical insight, stories about bars, and rebuilding, and reopened museums can portray an idealised Syria that the government is desperate to portray, rather than the Syria that is.