photo: Eddy van Wessel

Translate

Tuesday, August 18, 2015

Wars and censorship: we all lose

There is a saying about wars, that the truth is always their first victim. And for the war against the Islamic State, this is certainly true.

Mainly so, because independent journalists are not allowed to report from the ISIS frontlines, nor from inside the self-declared caliphate. They can only report from the side of ISIS enemies and they depend on news about the battle from them. How ISIS fights the battle, we only know through its own propaganda, mainly in social media, and propaganda often is disinformation.

Not being able to visit the areas under occupation means we do not have firsthand eyewitness accounts on what goes on there. We are dependent on what people who escaped from ISIS-land tell us—which almost per definition has to be a negative story.


Read more here

No comments: