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British Govt-Funded Outlet Offered Journalist $17,000 a Month to Produce Propaganda for Syrian Rebels

by Rania Khalek, via AlterNet

Emails reveal that a popular source for mainstream Western media is a U.K.-backed propaganda outlet.

The Revolutionary Forces of Syria (RFS) media office, a major Syrian opposition media outfit and frequent source of information for Western media, is funded by the British government and is managed by Westerners operating out of Turkey, according to emails provided to AlterNet by a Middle East reporter RFS tried to recruit.
The outlet stirred controversy this November when it released a video at the height of the Mannequin Challenge, a pop culture craze in which people compete for how long they can freeze in place on video.  The RFS video depicted a staged rescue by the White Helmets, the Western-funded rescue group that operates exclusively in rebel-held territory.  RFS quickly removed the video and issued an apology out of apparent concern that the staged rescue could raise questions about the authenticity of other videos by the White Helmets.
Over the summer, the Middle East reporter, who asked not to be named, was contacted by an American acquaintance and former colleague about working for RFS.
“I’m currently in Istanbul, working on a media project for the HMG [the British government],” wrote the acquaintance in an email time-stamped June 23. “We’re working on media surrounding the Syrian conflict, as one of their three partners.” The email included links to RFS Media’s English website and SMO Media, an Arabic website that covers the Southern Front, a Western-backed Free Syrian Army (FSA) group.
“[W]e’re looking for a managing editor/production manager to head up our team here in Istanbul, and I thought you’d be a great fit. I was wondering if you had any interest, or knew of anyone looking to move out to Istanbul for an opportunity,” the acquaintance added.
In a followup phone conversation, the acquaintance explained to the reporter what the job would entail.
“I would have been talking to opposition people on the ground and writing news pieces based on statements from media activists who are affiliated with the armed groups in places like Aleppo,” the reporter later explained.
The salary offered for this task was an eye-popping $17,000 a month.
The reporter ultimately decided not to pursue the RFS position because he felt it would be journalistically unethical.
“The idea that I would work for the government of a country that’s intimately involved in the Syrian conflict is one that’s incomprehensible for me as a journalist,” he told AlterNet.
“This was far beyond working for state-owned media in my opinion. It was to actually be a mouthpiece for specific armed groups that are backed by a Western regime with a long history of disastrous interference in this region. That doesn’t mean I don’t have sympathy for people who are against the Syrian government. I am not pro-regime. At the same time, I am a journalist and would like to maintain my integrity at that level.”
The reporter declined to recommend others for the job, saying, “I’m not going to facilitate some dubious relationship between a reporter and what is obviously a propaganda outlet,” he said.
RFS did not respond to a request for comment.
Go-to source for information-starved Western media
Western media often relies on self-described “media activists” in areas controlled by Western- and Gulf-backed militant groups, like Jabhat al-Nusra (until recently Al Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria), Ahrar al-Sham, Jaish al-Islam and Harakat Nour al-Din al-Zenki. These groups are explicitly anti-democratic and have been implicated in human rights violations from mass execution to using caged religious minorities as human shields. Most recently, civilians fleeing rebel-held eastern Aleppo have described being fired on by militants seeking to prevent them from escaping to the safety of government-controlled territory.
Two months ago, I spoke over the phone to a frequently quoted media activist living in East Aleppo. He told me that if he publicly criticizes the armed opposition groups, he risks being tortured, or worse. Indeed, a largely ignored report by Amnesty International published in June revealed that civilians in opposition-controlled Aleppo and Idlib have been subjected to abduction, torture and summary execution simply for criticizing armed groups on social media.
RFS’s videos and hashtags are regularly picked up by major Western media outlets. One of its videos has even been cited by human rights groups as evidence of Russian war crimes. Among its most viral campaigns is #AvengersInAleppo, which featured photos of children living in East Aleppo holding up signs calling on Marvel comic book superheroes to save them. (East Aleppo is controlled by a number of extremist groups led by Al Qaeda’s renamed offshoot, Jabhat Fatah al-Sham.)
Prior to that, RFS capitalized on the popularity of Pokémon Go to sell a pro-interventionist message to Western audiences with photos of children in opposition-controlled areas of Syria holding up photos of Pokémon characters with messages calling for intervention. The campaign garnered favorable media coverage from major outlets, including the Guardian, the Washington PostCNN, the IndependentReuters, and the BBC, none of which have bothered to question the origins of RFS or similar pro-opposition outlets.
A $3 million British government propaganda campaign for Syria’s rebels
RFS Media is just one of several different propaganda outlets financed by the U.K. Foreign Office. A recent investigation by the Guardian revealed that the British Foreign Office Conflict and Stability Fund has secretly pumped at least £2.4 million (over $3 million U.S.) into pro-rebel propaganda outfits based out of Istanbul.

The money began flowing after the British parliament voted against bombing the Syrian government in late 2013.  (RFS Media launched in December 2013 in both English and Arabic.)  The vote against war was attributed in large part to public pressure, as citizens on both sides of the Atlantic, reluctant to overthrow yet another Middle Eastern government after the disasters in Iraq and Libya, mobilized against another campaign for Western regime change in Syria.
After the political defeat, the U.K. Foreign Office embarked on a clandestine propaganda campaign to suppress the public’s anti-war sensibility, hiring private contractors to “produce videos, photos, military reports, radio broadcasts, print products and social media posts branded with the logos of fighting groups, and effectively run a press office for opposition fighters,” according to the Guardian.
The purpose of the propaganda, euphemistically referred to as “strategic communications” by the Foreign Office, is to clandestinely “influence the course of the war by shaping perceptions of opposition fighters” and provide “strategic communications and media operations support to the Syrian moderate armed opposition.”
Sanitizing the armed opposition as “moderate” has been a difficult task to be sure.  While Western officials were well aware of the extremist and violently sectarian ideology that dominated the opposition early in the conflict, they deliberately chose to whitewash their atrocities in favor of weakening the Syrian government.  RSF Media has stayed true to that goal, portraying armed groups as liberators and protectors adored by the people living under them, a narrative Western media outlets have enthusiastically echoed even as their own reporters were kidnapped, ransomed and even shot by Western-backed rebels.
This has presented a puzzling contradiction in Syria coverage. On the one hand, foreign reporters do not dare enter opposition areas for fear of being abducted. Yet the same media outlets that refrain from sending their reporters to opposition areas are comfortable amplifying propaganda that comes out of these areas with almost zero scrutiny, despite the fact that such information almost certainly requires the approval of the armed groups they fear may kidnap their reporters.
The warped picture of Syria that has been provided to Western media consumers is not the fault of the Syrian opposition, which is merely advancing its own most immediate public relations needs without regard for the objective truth, as combatants in war often do.  It is, however, a damning indictment of a media establishment that has failed to scrutinize convenient pro-war narratives that serve their own governments’ geopolitical interests.
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Rania Khalek is an independent journalist living in the Washington D.C. area.

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louisproyect
louisproyect
Dec 23, 2016 5:39 PM

$17,000 per month? That’s a drop in the bucket compared to Press TV, RT.com, Sputnik, Canary, 21st Century Wire, and about 10,000 other pro-Assad websites. Seeing this kind of complaint reminds me of the story of the Princess and the Pea. Once upon a time, a powerful and cruel princess who slept on 20 mattresses on top of 20 feather beds but could not get a good night’s sleep because of a pea beneath the bottom mattress. That story reminds me of you crossposting Rania Khalek’s article. That little pea of truth about Assad’s genocidal war that has cost the lives of over a half-million Syrians and the displacement from their homes of half the country keeps you up at night.

Norman Pilon
Norman Pilon
Dec 23, 2016 7:28 PM
Reply to  louisproyect

Dear Louis,
Are you by any chance American? You know, of the kind who flatter themselves believing that simultaneously holding to contradictory ideas is a sign of their superior and exceptional intelligence?
That little pea of truth isn’t a pea about Assad’s genocidal war, Louis. It’s a little pea highlighting the ‘fact’ of the propaganda in the Western press about Syria, you know, of widely disseminated lies about the situation in Syria so as to get the public behind murder on an industrial scale.
As for the half-million lives, from where did you get the notion that Assad, and no one else, is ultimately responsible for each of those deaths?
Or was that figure and attribution by any chance suggested to you by an exaggeration made somewhere, or did you arrive at it all on your own?
I’ll wager that you either lifted your ‘fact’ directly form the Western press or you have been reading so much of it, that you have by now unwittingly internalized its mode of “reasoning.”
But didn’t you just gracefully acknowledge the pea of truth, however, that maybe not everything published in the Western is to be trusted, and by extension, anything derived from it as either a primary source or mirroring its logic?
How do you sleep, Louis? I suppose that with a partially and permanently anesthetized mind, quite comfortably.

Jen
Jen
Dec 23, 2016 8:10 PM
Reply to  louisproyect

Dear Louis: Please enlighten us all here as to the amounts being paid to reporters by the likes of Press TV, RT.com, Russia Insider, Southfront.org, 21st Century Wire, Moon of Alabama, The Vineyard of the Saker and countless other “pro-Assad” or “pro-Putin” websites and blogs, so we can judge whether the salary the British government-funded project RFS Media was prepared to pay the freelancer does indeed rate as tiny.
I’m sure when I read the story of the Princess and the Pea years ago, there was no reference to any cruelty: the story was simply about a prince trying to find a woman of refined sensitivity and nobility, so much so that she could feel a pea beneath 20 layers of mattresses atop 20 layers of beds. A woman of lesser moral being, no matter her background, would not have been able to feel the pea at all.
You simply are not able to answer the issue raised in Rania Khalek’s article posted above, that a journalist was offered a large salary to write stenography for a propaganda outlet funded by the British government whose purpose is to disseminate lies to Western news media outlets about the nature of the war being fought in Syria. At the very least, couldn’t you have asked whether Khalek was able to verify through independent means that RFS Media really did have that job vacancy with that salary attached? Maybe you could apply for that job yourself to see if it is genuine?

BigB
BigB
Dec 23, 2016 12:05 PM

War is hell, but it is also a hell of a business racket – and British firms have profited to the tune of £60bn recently. This includes the £540m paid to Lord Bells PR company to make ‘fake terror videos’ so they could ‘track’ those who viewed them. Right, got that.
Two other figures stood out to me: $14.8m for coach hire and $12.4m for fruit and veg.
Without a scrap of evidence, I’m just saying that seems a lot. Given the Pentagons well known accuracy in accounting and the something like $6tn black hole in its budget – might that be creative accounting?
I wonder where the money may have gone?
https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2016/10/06/revealed-british-firms-paid-60-billion-obamas-pentagon/

mohandeer
mohandeer
Dec 22, 2016 4:06 PM

The UK government has been accused by the UN of trashing the human rights and discrimination of disabled people by selectively removing vital funds to keep a roof over their heads in their pursuit of “austerity” policies, yet they can find disgusting amounts of money to fund propagandist lies every month?
What an absolute disgrace the British Government is, not content to murder their own they quite happily sign off to murder of children in Syria.

Greg Bacon
Greg Bacon
Dec 22, 2016 12:24 PM

If you want to see how twisted, corrupt and phony the lying MSM is, this video of then President GW Bush joking about ‘finding’ Saddam’s WMD’s at the WH Press Dinner says it all. I don’t see why they’re laughing over a LIE that destroyed Iraq, killed over a million and made many Iraqis homeless, but I’m not a psychopath. The ones laughing and chortling over Bush’s antics are the MSM vultures that sold the WMD lie.

susannapanevin
susannapanevin
Dec 22, 2016 7:48 AM

Reblogged this on Susanna Panevin.

mohandeer
mohandeer
Dec 21, 2016 6:20 PM

Reblogged this on Worldtruth.