Brandjack News

By Quentin Langley

"I think that Vogue is always on the lookout for good-looking first ladies because they're a combination of power and beauty and elegance," or so journalist, Joan Juliet Buck, told NPR. For a magazine devoted to style and fashion, it has some sense. But to equate Asma al Assad with the Duchess of Cambridge or any other glamorous European princess is to miss a key point. They royal houses of Britain, Sweden and Spain don't order the bombing of towns in Sussex, Gotland or Catalonia. Still, as Buck hilariously told the New York Times, Mrs Assad is “extremely thin and very well-dressed, and therefore qualified to be in Vogue.”

Buck is not the villain here. Over the months after her article was published she became increasingly outspoken in her criticism of the Syrian regime and the way Vogue handled the article. Buck was not the author of the infamous "rose in the desert" headline.

Criticism online and in the MSM led Vogue to remove the article from its website, though it is still available online at the Syrian government's site. But it was only in response to a feature in the New York Times that Vogue's editor, Anna Wintour, eventually made a statement condemning Mrs Assad. 

And there remains an unanswered question. Buck claims that the children photographed for Vogue were not the ones she saw at the palace when she conducted the interview. Did the Assads have their children removed for the photoshoot and replaced with better looking ones? Did Vogue know?

Don't journalists – even those in very specialised publications – have a responsibility to consider the wider context of their work? There is a reason that the Syrian government has been paying an American PR firm $5000 a month to promote Asma al Assad in the western media. That the Assad's are young, highly educated and western – Asma is British and Bashar was educated in London – led too many commentators and leaders to give them the benefit of the doubt for too long. Many people genuinely hoped that Bashar Assad would reform Syria. That hope plainly died years ago. Western media should not be feeding the fantasy today.