Syria Media Sustainability Index (MSI)
November 19, 2012
About the MSI
IREX designed the MSI to measure the strength and viability of any country’s media sector. The MSI considers all the factors that contribute to a media system—the quality of journalism, effectiveness of management, the legal environment supporting freedom of the press, and more—to arrive at scores on a scale ranging between 0 and 4. These scores represent the strength of the media sector components and can be analyzed over time to chart progress (or regression) within a country. Additionally, countries or regions may be compared to one another. IREX currently conducts the MSI in 80 countries, and produced the first Middle East and North Africa MSI in 2005.
MSI Overview | Africa | Asia | Europe & Eurasia | Middle East & North Africa
Download the Complete Syria MSI Chapter (PDF): 2010/2011 | 2009 | 2008 | 2006/7 | 2005
MSI Syria - 2010/2011 Introduction
Overall Country Score: 1.23
In the year of an unprecedented challenge to its four-decade dictatorship, the Syrian regime declared war not only against its own people, but also the media. Two attacks on journalists in 2011 illustrated most starkly the regime’s attitude toward those who would challenge it through the media. On August 25, Ali Ferzat, a well-known Syrian cartoonist, was abducted by masked men, who beat him and stomped on his hands until the bones broke. Earlier that week Ferzat’s latest cartoon had depicted Assad hitching a lift with Libya’s fallen dictator. Three months later, Ferzat Jarban, a cameraman working in the rebel-held town of Qseir, south-west of Homs, was found dead, with his eyes gouged out. He was last seen being arrested by the secret police.
Dropping any pretense to objective reporting, both state-run Syria TV and Al Dunya, majority-owned by Assad’s first cousin, descended into overt propaganda. They began airing forced confessions from “terrorists” (the regime’s label for its opponents) and hosting “analysts” who called for the killing of protesters. Since “events are happening in Syria,” said Bouthaina Shaaban, an adviser to Syrian President Bashar al Assad on March 24, 2011, just a week into popular protests calling for change, “only Syrian television tells the truth, no one else.”
Syria’s long suppressed journalists quickly polarized into two irreconcilable camps: pro-opposition or pro-regime. Widely divergent scores by panelists reflected the great rift that had opened up as journalism descended into propaganda on both sides. “There’s no independent media when the issue is the country’s future,” said a panelist. “Syria is at a crossroads and every journalist knows that.”
The overall MSI score of 1.23 for 2010/2011, the highest the country has achieved since 2006/2007, should perhaps be understood less as a tangible improvement in media sustainability and more as the expression of a society under extreme stress, transforming in ways few thought possible, the outcome of which, both in media and politics, still unknown.
The revolution underway in 2011 was a time of immense repression as the regime sought to crush its opponents, including journalists, by force. State-controlled media shed its mask, revealing itself as a vehicle for lies and incitement. While many remained intimidated, however, some journalists flourished in the space opened up by the regime’s loss of control, as secret police redeployed from monitoring interviews in cafés to battling for control of the streets.
Note: MSI panelists in Syria agreed to participate only if they were not named publicly. Rather than hold a group discussion that might call attention to panelists’ participation in the study, the chapter is based on responses to individual questionnaires and the moderator’s individual interviews with the panelists.
