Looking back at the BBC’s record on Syria

Over the past few weeks, the BBC News website has published a considerable amount of content relating to the sudden regime change in Syria. Among the BBC reporters who flocked to Damascus after the fall of the Assad dictatorship was international editor Jeremy Bowen who, among other reports, produced one filmed at the presidential palace. The synopsis to that report includes the following:

“Jeremy Bowen has returned to Bashar al-Assad’s presidential palace in Damascus, almost a decade after he interviewed the Syrian president in 2015.

The BBC’s international editor recalls his impressions of the president following their conversation.”

Bowen’s “impressions” of Assad almost a decade on include this statement:

“He didn’t seem to be a guy who’d be at home in a torture centre but he certainly seemed to be a guy who would be very happy giving the orders to get people tortured and killed.” [emphasis in the original]

Long-time readers may remember that award winning yet unchallenging and uninformative interview:

BBC’S ASSAD INTERVIEW AND THE ‘RELATED ARTICLES’

Months later, Bowen provided Syria’s then deputy foreign minister with a worldwide platform from which to promote the unchallenged claim that “[t]he Syrian army has never, ever attacked or initiated any attack against a city or against a village.”:

BBC’S BOWEN PROVIDES A STAGE FOR SYRIAN PROPAGANDA

Additionally, Bowen produced several reports amplifying Assad regime propaganda while embedded with its armed forces:

BBC NEWS’ MIGRANT CRISIS COVERAGE: BOWEN EMBEDS WITH ASSAD

MORE BBC BOWEN BEATING OF THE ASSAD REGIME DRUM

None of Bowen’s 2015 reporting from Syria reflected the impressions of Assad that he now claims to have had at the time.

As was noted here in a 2021 summary of ten years of BBC reporting on the civil war in Syria, the corporation’s coverage of the regime’s chemical attacks – particularly during 2017 and 2018 – regularly amplified what was known to be Syrian regime and Russian propaganda:

REVIEWING A DECADE OF BBC REPORTING ON SYRIA

Similarly, BBC coverage repeatedly amplified Russian and Syrian regime propaganda concerning the White Helmets civil defence group.

For some two-and-a- half years, the BBC avoided adequately informing its audiences the links of the Syrian regime and its Hizballah allies to the Captagon industry and drug trafficking:

BBC FINALLY ENDS UNDER-REPORTING ON SYRIAN DRUG TRAFFICKING

With the BBC now having moved on to a new chapter in Syria, it is notable that the man who now claims to have understood Assad’s character back in 2015 nevertheless oversaw – and produced – reporting which repeatedly amplified Assad regime propaganda in his role as Middle East editor throughout most of the years of civil war.