Thus, ANTARA should soon establish cooperation with Syrian Arab News Agency SANA from which it can obtain objective stories which support the current Syrian government, Syrian Charge d`Affaires a.i, Bassam Alkhatib said at a meeting with ANTARA`s President Director Ahmad Mukhlis Yusuf here recently.
On the occasion, Bassam showed news stories both in the form of text and photos from foreign mass media on demonstrators staging protests recently in front of the Syrian embassy in Amman calling for the resignation of President Bashar al-Assad.
He expected that ANTARA take stories from SANA which produces objective stories on the situation in Syria rather than taking news from foreign mass media which tend to support the demonstrators, or the Indonesian news agency seek information from Syrian official sources who would tell the true situation in Syria.
Bassam said he believed that the demonstrators staged protests against the legitimate government under the auspices of certain big powers that want the Syrian president to resign and then they can maintain their interests in Syria.
SANA recently reported that the well-known Canadian thinker in the domain of political economy, Michel Chossudovsky, stressed that there was clear evidence of huge media disseminating misleading and fabricated reports regarding the latest events in Syria which some Arab and foreign mass media have worked on promoting since March 17.
In a lengthy analysis titled - Syria...Who Stands behind the Protest Movement, and using Fabrication and Lies to Justify Humanitarian Intervention by the USA and NATO in Syria - published by the Canadian Globalization Research Center, Chossudovsky added, "The Western media tries to depict the events in Syria as part of the Arab demonstrations which spread in Tunisia and Egypt ignoring the big difference between the two issues".
Meanwhile, ANTARA`s President Director Ahmad Mukhlis Yusuf said he would prefer taking stories from SANA as the official Syrian news agency which provides credible news stories on happenings which occur in its own country.
Like ANTARA, according to him, SANA is a means for the country to counter foreign mass media`s misleading information and news on Syria and situations in the Arab state.
Therefore, he said, he was committed to establishing cooperation between ANTARA and SANA on the exchange of news, among other things, for publication in support of the two governments and for the interests of the two countries and peoples.
In the effort to materialize the cooperation, the two sides have recently signed a memorandum of understanding on the exchange of news through the two news agencies` websites considered as the easiest and most effective way in making the cooperation possible.
(B005/A014)
Editor: Suryanto
Copyright © ANTARA 2011
