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Steyn: U.S. media ignoring Syrian uprising

Jeff Poor Media Reporter
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With a death toll estimated at 1,300 civilians plus more than 300 soldiers and police and a pending refugee crisis at its borders, the uprising in Syria has been absent from US and other Western nations’ media headlines.

That has raised questions for columnist Mark Steyn. In an appearance on Hugh Hewitt’s Thursday radio show, Steyn addressed the situation in Syria and asked why it’s being ignored.

“It’s perplexing to me that they’re far more interested in pro-Western dictators like [former Egyptian dictator Hosni] Mubarak than they are in somebody like [Syrian Dictator Bashar] Assad,” Steyn said. “Now I’ve been in favor of knocking off Assad for a decade. I think he’s weak. He’s not like his father. He is prepared to kill, but he’s not got that cunning that his father had. And hereditary dictatorships in that sense are always weak.”

Is there a lesson to be learned here, in that if you take a more aggressive tack against your own people as was the way Assad has unlike Mubarak earlier this year, you escape Western scrutiny?

“But what’s fascinating about this story is that unlike Mubarak, who in the end didn’t have the guts, as his fellow dictators would see it, to fire on the crowd and kill large number of people,” Steyn said. “And he’s now awaiting trial and his sons are in jail.”

According to Steyn, that’s the message that seems to be coming from the media.

“The message that we’re getting from the New York Times and other Western coverage is that more bloody and more brutal your dictatorship, the better your chance of survival,” he said. “If you’re a halfway civilized dictatorship like Mubarak, the New York Times will give you a much harder time.”

Jeff Poor