This is on the media.

Bob Garfield is away this week.

I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Have you noticed that coverage from Syria seems to come in waves?

Last week, it sounded like this.

Tonight, a bomb strikes at the heart of Syria's dictatorship.

That we could be in the closing stages of the Civil War in Syria.

Potential collapse in Damascus. Possibly the speculation

is within the next 36 hours. And this week, it sounds like this. So much for those predictions

that the Syrian regime would fall over the weekend. The government fighters are streaming

into Aleppo to try to crush the armed revolt, as they did last week in Damascus. If anyone thought President Assad was about to give up this fight, they have clearly been proven

wrong.

The first few segments of this show deal generally with believing what you see in here.

As the battle for Syria has moved from Damascus to the more populous city of Aleppo, much of the global audience and the media are still relying on videos uploaded online to follow events on the ground.

NPR Middle East correspondent Deb Amos joins us with some words of advice for the news-hungry web trawler.

Early on in this uprising, activists understood that the international media was not going to be

able to cover this conflict.

And so those citizen journalists, those activists, began to cover their own revolution.

I have met many of them who began as the documentarians of a peaceful uprising. They have moved on

to become the documenters of the armed conflict. Almost every rebel group in Syria has a media

arm to document their armed struggle against the regime, And those are all now posted on YouTube.

So how has the general message of these videos changed? These videos are a fundraising tool.

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