Mainstream Media Spreads News About Events in Syria 'That Never Happened'

Coverage of events in Syria by the mainstream media is very often intentionally distorted, Ahmad Dawa, the head of the Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) said at the New Era of Journalism: Farewell to Mainstream international media forum in Moscow.

MOSCOW (Sputnik) — Dawa said that reports about Syria by TV channels like al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya usually "were not accurate."

"Some channels like al-Jazeera or al-Arabiya immediately began to invent problems that existed in my country, most of reports were not accurate… All of a sudden [since the war in Syria began], many journalists from other countries came to Syria and started spreading information about the events that never happened… SANA information agency faced a lot of problems. It was a pre-planned campaign. It was an information war against the people of Syria," Dawa stressed.

The New Era of Journalism: Farewell to Mainstream international media forum, timed to coincide with the 75th anniversary of establishment of the Soviet Information Bureau, kicked off in the Russian capital earlier on Monday.

Media experts from 30 countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom, France, India, China, Armenia, Egypt, Azerbaijan and the United Arab Emirates, take part in the event hosted by the Rossiya Segodnya International Information Agency. The forum has opened with the session called "The journalist in the post-mainstream age," where Russian and foreign experts are expected to analyze media market trends and to discuss the features of the so-called post-mainstream age, trying to reveal regularities of its development.