This is What Gloating Looks Like … NY Times Distorts War-Torn Syria

• This is What Gloating Looks Like … NY Times Distorts War-Torn Syria
  by Finian Cunningham, https://www.rt.com/
  A supposed survey of war-torn Syria by America’s so-called “newspaper of record” was not merely shoddy journalism; it was a cynical attempt to rewrite the history of the eight-year war.
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  The meandering report of more than 2,700 words was headlined: “What ‘Victory’ Looks Like: A Journey Through Shattered Syria.” It would have been more accurate to have used the title, “What Gloating Looks Like.”
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  Even the sly way the word ‘victory’ is put in quotation marks indicates, from the outset, the insidious purpose of the article. To pour scorn on how Syria and its people have in actual fact defeated a foreign-sponsored criminal war for regime change. The regime-change plot goes back to at least 2005 as this old CNN interview clumsily admits.
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  With mawkish words, the New York Times reporters effect to lament the rubble and grief among the Syrian population. But all the while, the implication conveyed is that President Bashar Assad “presided over the destruction.”
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  It would be easy to dismiss the article for the ropey, agenda-led “journalism” that it is. But since journalism is reputed to be the “first draft” of writing history, it is therefore important that the distortion presented by the NY Times is repudiated for the outright falsification that it is.
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  We can’t go into every erroneous, obnoxious detail. And readers would be advised to go to alternative reports by independent journalists like Eva Bartlett and Vanessa Beeley for accurate accounts of how Syrians are dealing with the aftermath of war and what the people actually think about who caused their war-torn fate.
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  But suffice to say that three salient distortions or omissions can be cited to condemn the NY Times as a purveyor of propaganda. First is the staggering assertion that Syria’s lunar landscape of destruction was brought about by warplanes and artillery deployed by the state’s armed forces.
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  Secondly, there is not a single mention of US and other NATO states carrying out – and continuing to carry out – air strikes on Syrian infrastructure for the past five years, which have resulted in thousands of civilian deaths. Probably the most infamous episode was the American obliteration of the city of Raqqa two years ago during which an estimated 1,600 people, including women and children, were buried under rubble from indiscriminate bombing.
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