"Journalism in the face of Power" / A Thread. Last week, one of @newlinesmag most talented editors @kshaheen wrote an article for @OpenCanada about how he was affected by his reporting from #Syria and the Middle East. https://opencanada.org/syria-destroyed-my-faith-in-what-journalism-can-accomplish/

It is a powerful piece, shot-through with the pain of disillusionment, as Shaheen concludes that, despite working as one of the highest-profile journalists in the region, his efforts could not save Syrians from an endless war. In this thread, I want to explore aspects of why.

The difficulties of reporting on hard, contentious topics are well-known in journalism circles, but often lesser known beyond them. Just this week @martinchulov wrote a justly praised piece on #WhiteHelmets founder @lemesurierjames and @MaydayRescue https://www.theguardian.com/news/2020/oct/27/syria-disinformation-war-white-helmets-mayday-rescue-james-le-mesurier

Reading Le Mesurier's widow Emma Winberg talk about the toll the active disinformation campaign took on her and their relationship is moving. It highlights the extraordinary resilience necessary to keep going when faced with the pressures that come from opposition to state power

Twitter, you see, has tricked us (sorry @jack!); it has created a sense that the ability to have your words out in public, debating with strangers half a world away, has eroded the structures of institutional power. But it has not.

Words matter, whether here on Twitter, in magazines such as ours, or spoken across television networks. But words are sometimes too small in a world of power. Shaheen writes, "Syria was the most intimately reported conflict in history. Nobody could say they did not know."

And that's true. No-one could say they did not know, and spending any time glancing through Twitter showed how many people knew (and how many more chose not to, but that's another thread). The question is how, in the face of so much information, was there so little action?

How could words mean so little? And the answer is that words matter only as far as they provoke action. And on #Syria, they could not provoke sufficient action to offset the money, weapons, institutions and governments stacked on the other side.

Words failed Syria. They failed because knowing isn't enough. Words and images bear extraordinary power, but they are sometimes too small in the face of hard power – the power of guns and governments – determined to do something else.

This is big topic and the power of journalism is both a belief and recurring theme for us @newlinesmag. Tonight, I'll be returning to it in an interview with @Anna_Pantelia - tune in to https://www.facebook.com/newlinesmagazine/ to watch us this evening.

For now, it is worth considering what it means when journalists like @kshaheen move on from seeking the truth in war zones. It means the balance tips slightly away from the words and photographs we all need to see. But we should also consider our own culpability.

The best #journalism isn't entertainment. It is a call to action, a call to make the words and decisions we have available to us count. Knowing is not enough, yet it is the limit of a journalist's responsibility to tell us. We get to decide what we do with that knowledge.