Covering Syria in the West (and East)

There is an article, or even a book, to be written on how Syria has been covered in the last few weeks in Western and Saudi/Qatari/Syrian media.  You certainly can't trust the Syrian regime media; the other day Syrian TV was blaming "anarchists".  I kid you not.  I was personally offended.  So now it is a Salafite-anarchist conspiracy?  And the Saudi/Qatari media (which are indistinguishable as of late), can't be trusted either. They don't cover or inform anymore: they merely propagandize (well, to be fair, Saudi media did that all along, but one expected something different from Aljazeera).  They rush to post anything about Syria that fits into the agenda of Western government: we are talking about NATO media now, really.  Look at the story of the Syrian ambassador in France: Al-Arabiyya TV (the news station of King Fahd's brother-in-law) is now claiming that the story originated with France 24.  In reality, the story was top news all day on Al-Arabiyya' s website, and it did not attribute it to France 24 but to its own correspondent in Paris.  And even when the story was revealed to be false or fabricated, the Western media, including the New York Times, cover it as an opportunity to still maintain that it was true.  A friend of the ambassador who listened to the statement on France 24 told me that it was clear not her.  Yet, the New York Times writes a whole article to still imply it was true.  In Syria, we are bombarded by lies and fabrications by all sides. It is a difficult story to cover.  I recommend the articles that have been published in As-Safir by Ghadi Francis (who was fired from the SSNP for those independent articles).   I get messages from Syrians daily and one thing is clear: people are scared: scared of the repressive regime and scared of what may come later.  The secular progressives have the most difficult time: they oppose the regime and they oppose the dominant trends in the opposition.