CAIRO–When it seized huge parts of Syria and Iraq this year, the self-proclaimed Islamic State–and the geopolitical chaos surrounding it–became one of the biggest news stories on the planet. But journalists have little means of directly reporting on the group, its activities on the ground, or the havoc it has sown in the region.
A physical meeting with the group’s members could mean a death sentence; this is an organization notorious for kidnapping and murdering journalists, both foreign and local. Before ISIS was even created, a wave of kidnappings of journalists had already made much of Syria off-limits for reporters. With no way to access ISIS-controlled territory, some journalists have turned to mining social media.
ISIS and its supporters produce a vast quantity of tweets and other material, much of it in English. The majority of this content is propaganda and banter. But some of this outpouring of posts, if treated carefully, is news. ISIS accounts tweeted updates on the group’s advances in Iraq. During the group’s takeover of the Iraqi city of Mosul in June, those accounts reportedly posted a staggering 40,000 tweets in one day.
The torrent of tweets, memes, and videos can’t be simply ignored. However, it is easy for reporting on jihadi social media to slide into the realm of the ancillary, the inane, and the gross. When respected news organizations post stories about ISIS members handling kittens, posing with jars of Nutella, or proposing marriage to American pundits, it sheds very little light on the vast human and political crisis of which ISIS is both a cause and an outcome. Worse still, it runs the risk of simply reproducing ISIS propaganda.
“Let the responsible news organizations invest time and resources in investigating ISIS’ finances, its human rights abuses, its battlefield gains and losses, the real hard work,” says Borzou Daragahi, Middle East and North Africa Correspondent for the Financial Times. “Leave the clickbait for less established, irresponsible news organizations.”
There are other ways for journalists to report on ISIS, but they are expensive, time consuming, and often unglamorous. News outlets can send reporters to Baghdad, Irbil, Turkey’s borderlands with Syria, and Lebanon. Journalists can interview people who have left ISIS-controlled areas, including victims of its abuses. We can report from the other side of the front lines in Iraqi Kurdistan. We can investigate ISIS’ control over crucial supplies of oil, wheat, and other commodities.
Some major news organizations do devote staff and resources to reporting on ISIS the hard way. But wire journalists, social media reporters, and anyone writing on a deadline will have no choice but to monitor the ISIS-sphere for news. When using social media from Syria and Iraq as a source, the standard wisdom applies: Proceed with caution. Verify identities when possible. Secure your data and communications. And above all, remain skeptical.
Any other approach risks becoming sloppy reporting. A reminder of this axiom came this week with the revelation that a widely circulated video claiming to show a Syrian boy rescuing a girl in Syria was a fake, staged in Malta by a Norwegian filmmaker. The filmmaker’s apology came too late for the New York Post, which ran stills taken from the video on its front page.
ISIS’ social media presence is also a massive phenomenon that warrants careful research and reporting beyond its instrumental use as a primary source. The tweets are more than a megaphone–they are a sign of ISIS’ ambition, part of what set the group’s declared state-building project apart from the sect-like secrecy of its forerunner, Al-Qaeda.
“It seems that ISIS has really devoted a lot of attention to its media relations and its strategic communications,” said Courtney C. Radsch, advocacy director at the Committee to Protect Journalists. “It’s clear that that they’ve gotten some pretty sophisticated media strategists and social media tacticians on their team.”
There are other major ISIS-related stories are going unreported. Steven Brill pointed out one such story: the oft-cited figure of 15,000 foreign fighters who are reported to have joined the group in Iraq and Syria. “[W]ith many carrying U.S. passports or passports from countries where they don’t need visas to come to the United States,” he wrote, “an army of journalists should be tracking all that.”
But even those journalists doing rigorous, on-the-ground reporting on the crises in Iraq, Syria, and neighboring countries lament that the ISIS obsession has eclipsed other important stories in the region.
“I feel like I’m no longer a Middle East and North Africa correspondent. I feel like I’m a murasel Daesh, an ISIS correspondent,” says Daragahi, who has made several trips to Baghdad this year. “I feel like every nuance and social and political development, every economic development in the entire region is being subsumed into this ISIS narrative, which is really scary.”
The western media’s obsession with ISIS is not unfounded. The group’s conquest in Iraq and Syria is an event of great consequence. The group’s penchant for spectacle–its gruesome beheading videos included–further draws the media’s gaze.
“I think it also, sadly, feeds into Western narratives, Western prejudices against Islam and Muslims,” says Daragahi. “I think it feeds into that bigotry. I think there’s genuine fear. It’s whipped up hysteria. And these guys are good at whipping up that hysteria themselves.”
Jared Malsin is a freelance journalist based in Cairo