"When Al Arabiya and Al Jazeera do comment directly on Syrian affairs, they tend to paper over the rebels' flaws and emphasize the conflict's religious fault lines. Perhaps the low point of both channels' Syrian uprising coverage was when they gave a platform to extremist Sunni cleric Adnan al-Arour, who once said of Syria's Alawite minority that Sunnis "shall mince them in meat grinders and feed their flesh to the dogs" for their support of President Bashar al-Assad. While Al Arabiya referred to "the sheikh" as a "symbol of the revolution," Al Jazeera introduced him as the "biggest nonviolent instigator against the Syrian regime...
A large segment of Al Jazeera's and Al Arabiya's audiences, appalled by the Syrian regime's brutality, no doubt genuinely believes that this is strictly a battle of good versus evil. For the Saudi and Qatari governments, however, Syria's fate directly affects their political future -- they want to see the fall of the regime for either personal or strategic reasons. The looming end of Assad's Syria is yet another chapter in the transformation of the old Arab state order, which began with the fall of Saddam Hussein's Iraq and the end of Hosni Mubarak's Egypt. It is a story that is simply too important to be left in the hands of media outlets looking to advance their own narrow interests."
Breaking the Arab News - By Sultan Al Qassemi | Foreign Policy
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