The guardian
When does journalism become propaganda? That was the question being asked in the SBS newsroom last week when the network scored an exclusive interview with the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad. Airing on Friday, the night before the election, reporter Luke Waters’ interview was hard won. He spent two years pursuing what he now describes as a “bizarre experience”.
“Once inside, I meet with the senior press office staff responsible for arranging the interview,” Waters says. “After Arabic coffee and small talk, logistics for the next day’s interview are discussed. It’s made clear that the interview must not be edited in any fashion. The department head, a former news anchor herself, explains that hard questions are welcome but rudeness and interruptions are not.”
SBS agreed to a pre-interview discussion with officials, to broadcast the 25-minute interview in full and to use the footage shot by four of the regime’s own cameras inside the presidential palace in Damascus. Some SBS journalists told Beast they believe too many restrictions were placed on the network. A spokesman for SBS denies the questions were approved beforehand but says “we provided the topic areas for questions” and confirms all the editing was done by the regime.
“The Syrian technical team compiled the interview with SBS’s Luke Waters present,” a spokesman told Beast. “SBS confirms that the cut was the full interview and that no questions or answers were edited out.”
Perhaps the best test of how beneficial the exercise was for Assad – who was labelled a “murderous tyrant” by the Australian prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull – is to see how the regime reported the interview in its state-run media. The official Syrian media said:
President Bashar al-Assad said the contradiction seen between the Australian officials’ statements and the official Australian stance towards Syria is an expression of the double standards followed by the West in general.
“They attack us politically, and then they send their officials to deal with us under the table, especially their security officials – including their government,” added the president in an interview with the Australian SBS TV channel due to be aired on Friday.
“All of them do that as they don’t want to upset the US … In fact, most of the western officials only repeat what the US wants them to say.”
The full interview will be posted on the Syrian Presidency’s official Facebook page at 12: 30pm on Friday (Damascus time) at the same time the interview will be aired on the Australian TV channel (Canberra time).
Allergic to Nutt?
ABC news aired a most unfortunate subtitle on Wednesday night, accidentally labelling Tony Nutt the Liberal party’s “dictator” instead of director. Was it because Nutt had been described in several reports in recent days as one?
“Tony Nutt, the head of the Coalition’s re-election campaign, has been accused of blowing the government’s poll chances by running an eight-week ‘dictatorship’,” according to news.com.au.
Or was it because the billionaire retailer Gerry Harvey lamented that Australia was ungovernable and should bring in a dictator? The ABC apologised for the slip at the end of the bulletin.