An article published Tuesday on the Guardian stated that the Western media have been ignoring information and polls that reveal the Syrian people’s support to President Bashar Al-Assad.

An article published Tuesday on the Guardian by the paper’s former international affairs columnist Jonathan Steele stated that the Western media have been ignoring information and polls that reveal the Syrian people’s support to President Bashar Al-Assad.

“When coverage of an unfolding drama ceases to be fair and turns into a propaganda weapon, inconvenient facts get suppressed,” Steele said, indicating that a recent poll revealed that “while most Arabs outside Syria feel the president should resign, attitudes in the country are different. Some 55% of Syrians want Assad to stay.”

The author further considered that the “biased media coverage also continues to distort the Arab League's observer mission in Syria.”

“Its (the Arab League’s) decision to mediate in Syria was less welcome to western governments, and to high-profile Syrian opposition groups, who increasingly support a military rather than a political solution. So the league's move was promptly called into doubt by western leaders, and most western media echoed the line,” he added.

In parallel, Steele pointed out that the “critics” feared that the Arab observers would report that “the image of peaceful protests brutally suppressed by army and police is false”, and that some cities in Syria have become like “Beirut in the 1980s or Sarajevo in the 1990s, with battles between militias raging across sectarian and ethnic fault lines.”