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Foreign Correspondents Bring Lessons in Covering War-Torn Syria to SU's Newhouse School

Scott Willis
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WAER News

Seasoned journalists from the front lines of the Syrian conflict told an audience at Syracuse University Thursday that the media has fallen short on how it chooses to cover the humanitarian crisis.  Sherine Tadros spent most of her career as a Middle East correspondent for Al Jazeera English, and now serves as head of the UN office of Amnesty International.  She recalls reporting from Turkey as refugees arrived.

“I would see a boat coming through and then just pick on the mother that lost a child or the father that is very very desperate and interview them and sort of try to humanize it, thinking that I’m doing a very good job,” Tadros said. “I’m showing people how desperate these people are, that they’ve lost everything that they have nothing.  But then when I wore my UN hat and was talking to these leaders, I realized that that was very unhelpful.”

Tadros says she has since learned that there was another side to their journey.

Credit Scott Willis / WAER News
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WAER News
National Geographic Photographer Reza addresses the audience. Seated next to him is Roy Gutman, former foreign correspondent for McClatchy and Newsday.

“The ones that choose to make that journey are doing so because they are hopeful," Tadros said.  “It is because they think that they have something to offer to the country...that they’re going to because they speak a certain language or they have a certain skill.  But me as a correspondent, I didn’t necessarily pick up on that.”

Roy Gutman is a former foreign correspondent for McClatchy and Newsday

“One of the problems in covering refugees arriving in Greece or leaving Turkey is that these people are actually the better off of the people in Syria," Gutman said.  “In order to get the crossing they had to pay up to $1,000 a head, they came with their savings,  pockets full of money.  The story that we missed are the people that couldn’t afford it or the people who are stuck living five families to one room in southern Turkey or in Jordan or in Lebanon.  Even moreso it’s the millions of people inside of Syria who are internally displaced, living in tents if they're lucky, sometimes under tarps under the sky.  This is something that we journalists have not covered at all."

Gutman has covered the Balkan wars and Bosnia, and calls Syria the biggest crisis on earth.  A National Geographic Photojournalist named Reza believes there isn’t enough discussion about how corporate control of the media across the globe has contributed to the lack of deeper coverage.

“We have to come up here in this university to talk about what the next generation of the media should be," Reza said. “How should we be reporting happenings? Because we could tell that this was wrong, this is not good.  There is no media out today in the way that was started hundred years ago.”

Reza, Roy Gutman, and Sherine Tadros were part of a panel discussion on the media’s coverage of the Syrian conflict at the Newhouse school Thursday. 

Credit Scott Willis / WAER News
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WAER News
The day-long series of panel discussions was accompanied by a series of photographs, some disturbing, capturing the desperation of refugees.

Scott Willis covers politics, local government, transportation, and arts and culture for WAER. He came to Syracuse from Detroit in 2001, where he began his career in radio as an intern and freelance reporter. Scott is honored and privileged to bring the day’s news and in-depth feature reporting to WAER’s dedicated and generous listeners. You can find him on twitter @swillisWAER and email him at srwillis@syr.edu.