We tracked 510 sources across 6,146 articles and 7 factions to answer a simple question: who actually covers Syria, and what are they all missing?
Independent Syrian outlets produce the most coverage overall, but the single loudest voice is SANA, the state news agency, with 728 articles in under two weeks. The government doesn't need many outlets. It needs volume. International and regional media together publish more, spread across hundreds of sources. The state publishes less diversely, but relentlessly.
Every bubble is a source. Left to right: how reliable. Bottom to top: how much they publish. Bigger bubbles cover more of Syria's 14 governorates. The loudest voices are named on the figure.
Who covers where, and who doesn't. Dark cells aren't just empty data. They're entire populations no one is writing about. Sometimes what's missing tells you more than what's there.
3 faction-governorate pairs have zero coverage in our dataset. The most notable blind spots: Regional → Hama, Regional → Latakia, NGO → Latakia. These represent systematic absences, regions where entire media ecosystems have gone silent.
When you publish says where you sit. State media runs on Damascus office hours. Wire services fire on the US/EU morning cycle. Kurdish outlets surge in late afternoon, field reporters filing after the day's events in the northeast. The clock doesn't lie.
Publishing a lot doesn't make you good. We measured five things that actually matter: Do you cover the whole country? Do you publish in both languages? How long are your pieces? Do you break news or just repeat it? The answers are revealing.
| Faction | Articles | Bilingual | Breaking | Avg length | Avg governorate reach |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Governmental | 1,081 | 100% | 19% | 650 | 33.6 |
| International | 1,483 | 99% | 3% | 390 | 1.6 |
| Regional | 734 | 99% | 8% | 139 | 3.5 |
| Independent | 1,923 | 98% | 9% | 535 | 7.1 |
| Kurdish | 504 | 99% | 5% | 432 | 11.7 |
| NGO | 159 | 100% | 8% | 783 | 3.3 |
| # | Source | Faction | Tier | Articles | Avg length | Breaking % | Bilingual |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | SANA Arabic | Governmental | T1 | 728 | 783 chars | 21% | 100% |
| 2 | AP (via Google News) | International | T1 | 214 | 65 chars | 1% | 100% |
| 3 | Enab Baladi Arabic | Independent | T1 | 136 | 3,026 chars | 14% | 100% |
| 4 | SANA (English) | Governmental | T1 | 135 | 111 chars | 5% | 100% |
| 5 | Enab Baladi (TG) | Independent | T1 | 133 | 239 chars | 2% | 100% |
| 6 | AFP | International | T1 | 121 | 49 chars | 1% | 100% |
| 7 | Enab Baladi | Independent | T1 | 82 | 1,827 chars | 11% | 98% |
| 8 | Joshua Landis (Twitter) | International | T1 | 53 | 183 chars | 4% | 100% |
| 9 | Charles Lister (Twitter) | International | T1 | 45 | 224 chars | 7% | 98% |
| 10 | Reuters (via Google News) | International | T1 | 32 | 59 chars | 0% | 100% |
Absence is data. Below: not just who's quiet, but what topics each governorate is missing, measured against the national average. A negative delta means a story is being under-told. These gaps aren't random. They're structural.
| Governorate | Articles | Factions present | No coverage from |
|---|---|---|---|
| Latakia | 65 | 4 of 6 | Regional, NGO |
| Hama | 132 | 5 of 6 | Regional |
| Damascus | 884 | 6 of 6 | , |
| Rural Damascus | 115 | 6 of 6 | , |
| Aleppo | 505 | 6 of 6 | , |
| Homs | 212 | 6 of 6 | , |
| Idlib | 127 | 6 of 6 | , |
| Tartus | 174 | 6 of 6 | , |
| Deir ez-Zor | 130 | 6 of 6 | , |
| Raqqa | 322 | 6 of 6 | , |
| Al-Hasakah | 177 | 6 of 6 | , |
| Daraa | 193 | 6 of 6 | , |
| As-Suwayda | 204 | 6 of 6 | , |
| Quneitra | 100 | 6 of 6 | , |
Each cell compares a governorate's topic coverage against the national average. A negative delta means under-covered, a positive one over-covered. The delta isn't about missing articles, it's about warped proportions. A governorate might have plenty of coverage overall, but if 90% of it is about security and none about economics, that distortion matters.
| Governorate | Political | Military | Economic | Governance | Security | Displacement | Humanitarian | Human rights | Reconstruction | Prisoners | Diplomacy | Education | Chem. weapons |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Damascus | −1.1 | −5.9 | +2.0 | +3.4 | −2.8 | −1.0 | −0.4 | +2.1 | +1.7 | +1.0 | −0.2 | +1.4 | −0.3 |
| Rural Damascus | −2.9 | −5.1 | −1.4 | +0.2 | −1.3 | +1.3 | +2.4 | +2.1 | +2.5 | +1.8 | −1.5 | +1.8 | +0.3 |
| Aleppo | −3.7 | −1.8 | −1.7 | +0.6 | +2.7 | +1.5 | +1.4 | +2.2 | −0.5 | −2.4 | −0.1 | +1.5 | +0.4 |
| Homs | −6.6 | −3.1 | −2.7 | −1.4 | +5.9 | 0.0 | +1.5 | +4.5 | +2.2 | +3.0 | −2.9 | −0.5 | 0.0 |
| Hama | −0.7 | −7.8 | +2.8 | −0.1 | −3.1 | +1.9 | −0.9 | +4.4 | +5.6 | −0.6 | −2.3 | +0.9 | 0.0 |
| Idlib | −3.8 | −6.8 | +1.0 | −2.7 | −1.6 | +0.8 | +2.4 | +4.7 | +3.6 | +2.2 | −1.2 | +0.3 | +1.0 |
| Latakia | −0.9 | −5.4 | +1.2 | +0.5 | −3.4 | −0.6 | +3.2 | +1.8 | +4.0 | +1.3 | −0.9 | −1.3 | +0.5 |
| Tartus | −3.9 | −9.3 | +0.4 | +1.4 | −6.5 | +7.8 | +5.7 | +1.2 | +5.4 | −1.3 | −2.6 | +1.2 | +0.6 |
| Deir ez-Zor | −1.3 | −3.7 | +0.8 | −2.6 | −0.5 | −0.1 | +0.5 | +2.5 | +0.2 | +4.4 | −1.1 | +0.5 | +0.1 |
| Raqqa | +1.1 | −1.3 | −3.3 | −0.5 | +3.6 | +1.3 | +1.5 | −1.8 | −1.7 | +2.3 | +0.4 | −1.7 | +0.1 |
| Al-Hasakah | +1.4 | −1.6 | +0.1 | +0.3 | −0.7 | +2.0 | +4.0 | −1.8 | +0.6 | −2.6 | −1.6 | −0.6 | +0.4 |
| Daraa | −3.2 | −1.4 | −1.4 | +0.3 | +0.3 | −0.4 | −0.2 | +4.4 | +1.1 | +1.8 | −2.2 | +0.7 | +0.2 |
| As-Suwayda | −2.8 | −1.4 | −3.5 | +0.5 | +1.6 | +1.4 | −0.5 | +4.8 | +1.3 | 0.0 | −2.0 | +0.4 | +0.1 |
| Quneitra | −2.6 | +5.7 | −1.7 | −0.7 | −0.1 | −0.6 | +2.9 | −1.5 | −2.7 | +6.1 | · | −2.3 | +1.2 |
Tartus has -9.3% military coverage vs. national average, the deepest topic gap of any governorate. Yet it hosts Russia's naval base at Tartus port. Meanwhile, displacement (+7.8%) is wildly over-reported. The media tells Tartus's displacement story but ignores its military reality.
Idlib (-2.7%) and Deir ez-Zor (-2.6%) are under-covered on governance, the very regions where competing governance models (HTS in Idlib, tribal/SDF in DZ) are most contested. Damascus (+3.4%) absorbs all the governance attention.
Kurdish media covers 7 economic articles total, across all of northeastern Syria. International media is barely better. Yet the northeast sits on Syria's oil fields and wheat belt. The economic story of a third of Syria's territory is essentially untold.
Across all 510 sources and 6,146 articles, only 23 mention chemical weapons. Governmental sources: 3. International: 5. In a country where chemical attacks shaped the entire international intervention debate, the topic has nearly vanished from coverage.
International media published 14 education articles from all of Syria. Kurdish outlets: 15. NGOs: 3. A generation of children is growing up in fragmented school systems, curriculum battles between HTS, SDF, and Damascus, and the world's press covers it less than a single day's security incidents.
Hama (+5.6%) and Tartus (+5.4%) are over-covered on reconstruction, coastal/central areas with existing infrastructure. Meanwhile, Raqqa and DZ, the most destroyed cities in Syria, get average or below-average reconstruction coverage. The media follows the cranes, not the rubble.
Everything here comes from Nawafith's own data, 10 days of continuous monitoring, March 13–22, 2026. No third-party datasets. No surveys. Just what the sources actually published.
Tier 1, Verified Primary: Official agencies, on-the-ground correspondents, original reporting with named sources. Tier 2, Reliable Secondary: Established outlets with editorial oversight, aggregating and contextualizing primary reports. Tier 3, Aggregator/Scrape: RSS feeds, social media scrapers, content aggregators, useful for volume but requiring verification.
Sources are classified into 6 factions based on ownership, editorial line, and geographic origin: Governmental (Syrian state-aligned), International (global wire services and foreign press), Regional (Arab/Turkish/Iranian regional media), Kurdish (Kurdish-language and Kurdish-interest outlets), Neutral (independent Syrian civil society media), and NGO (humanitarian and human rights monitoring organizations).
RSS bias: Sources without machine-readable feeds are underrepresented. Telegram coverage is incomplete, encrypted channels and private groups are outside scope. Geographic tagging relies on NLP entity extraction, which may miss implicit location references. Article counts reflect indexed pieces, not raw editorial output. The 510-source figure includes all monitored outlets, including inactive ones from the full historical dataset.
Active monitoring window: March 13–22, 2026 (10-day primary window). Historical coverage extends to 2013 for some international sources. All faction-governorate matrices and publishing pattern data reflect the active monitoring window only. Bilingual rate and body length averages use the full source lifetime where available.