Media coverage of events in Syria.

[Magda Hassan]

Oh, really?

Reading the Fake Reuters Reports on Syria

By ROBERT MACKEYAs my colleague Christine Haughney reports on Media Decoder, Reuters temporarily suspended the operation of its blogging platform on Friday after the news agency said its Web site was hacked and false reports of setbacks for Syrian rebels were posted online.
In a statement, Reuters said, "Our blogging platform was compromised and fabricated blog posts were falsely attributed to several Reuters journalists." The company said it had no idea who was behind the hacking, but archived copies of two items posted on the news site suggest that they were not written by native English speakers.
One of the fake reports, posted on a blog written by Jeffrey Goldfarb, a commentator on investment banking, appeared under the headline "Riad Al-Asaad: Syrian Free Army Pulls Back Tactically From Aleppo." According to a copy of the post found in Google's cache by The Atlantic Wire, the report claimed that the commander of the rebel Free Syrian Army had "confirmed on a phone call to Reuters that the regular army killed 1000 soldiers of Free Syrian Army and arrest around 1500."
Continuing in similarly fractured English, the phony Mr. Goldfarb added:

In his first unlikely "unusual" statement, Al-Asaad said that the Syrian Free Army will withdraw from all Syrian cities due to the huge losses caused upon the soldiers, as well, the betrays made by Free Army soldiers, due to the within inside clashes appeared among them, for money and positions.
Riad Al-Asaad accused Qatar and Saudi Arabia of betraying him; dealing secretly with the Syrian regime.
He revealed that Riyadh and Doha has made a secret deal with Damascus to eliminate the Syrian Free Army for investments and privileges in Syria.

The editor of the blog Moon of Alabama, who writes as Bernhard and wasinitially taken in by the false posts, managed to capture a screenshot of what seemed to be a later, slightly more polished version of that report before it was removed from the Reuters site. That version of the post, which contained linguistic and factual errors of its own like calling the Gregorian calendar the "Georgian calendar," also reported as if it were a matter of fact that the Syrian rebels "are expected to re-coordinate in Turkish territory where they have set up secret bases under the close supervision with the Turkish government and the Israeli intelligence service."
Moon of Alabama's editor also saved an image of a second fake post, "Rebel Resistance Collapses in Key Suburbs," which appeared under the byline of Frederick Kempe, a former Wall Street Journal reporter who now leads the Atlantic Council, a Washington research institution.
That fake blog post, which was also written in the form of a wire service news report, not an analytical commentary, began with similar news of catastrophe for the rebels in Aleppo, and similar errors of grammar and syntax.

The Syrian rebels fighting the forces of Assad have fallen in key districts of their stronghold Salah Al Deen in Aleppo. This comes hours after the army has announced that it has destroyed the communication network provided by Turkey. Earlier the rebel forces have complained that they are running low on ammunition as the city has been completely surrounded by government forces, coupled with lack of communications, has left the rebels in disarray. Several trucks with mounted heavy machine guns have been destroyed, leading to the deaths of 20 rebels.

Mr. Kempe's impostor also embedded a YouTube video said to show Syrian government tanks on the move, set to martial music, and made note of a report from a "journalist on the ground, Hussein Mortada." Mr. Mortada, who is not usually cited by Western news organizations as a credible source of information, is a Lebanese supporter of the Syrian government who runs the Damascus bureau of Iran's state television channels. He was in the news in April, when a trove of hacked e-mails obtained by The Guardian included what appeared to be a message from Mr. Mortada to a Syrian government media adviser, suggesting a change in strategy.
At the time, Mr. Mortada denied that he had advised President Bashar al-Assad's government and defended his work for Iranian television in an interview with the Arab newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat.
As the Moon of Alabama blogger noted, another journalist working for Iranian state television in Syria, Maya Naser, drew attention to the post mentioning Mr. Mortada on Twitter.

[COLOR=#333333 !important]Maya Naser@nasermaya[/COLOR]
Rebel resistance collapses in key suburbsblogs.reuters.com/thinking-globa… #[B]Aleppo[/B]

[B]4 Aug 12[/B][B]

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[B][B][B][B]That reporter's recent dispatches from Aleppo for Press TV, an English-language satellite channel owned by Iran's government, have suggested that life in the city remains calm for most residents. In a report posted online on Friday, Mr. Naser passed on Syrian military claims that they were fighting foreigners, not Syrians, in Aleppo.[/B][/B]

[B][B][B][B]A recent video report from the Syrian city of Aleppo on Press TV, an Iranian state channel.
[/B][/B][/B][/B][/B][/B]<span style="font-family: georgia"><strong><strong><strong><strong>[B][B][B]
[B][B][B][B][B]Late Friday, Press TV claimed that Syrian opposition figures had made death threats against both Mr. Mortada and Mr. Naser "over their factual coverage of ongoing clashes in the restive northwestern city of Aleppo."[/B][/B]
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http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08...-on-syria/