I have talked via chat to folks in Aleppo when they were getting shelled indiscriminately by rebels (whenever they intermittently had power/signal). I have spoken with English speaking Kurds. No-one liked Assad, but he is a secular leader and the best of a whole bunch of terrible options.
Anyways, you don't have to take my word for it. Some very few media outlets like the UK's telegraph/independent went against the grain and confirmed several such stories independently. When the Battle of Aleppo was reaching its heights, Syrian civilians were being shelled by NATO weapons. All such claims were dismissed by the Obama administration at the time. Now they are slowly getting revealed:
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/syria-war-bosnia-saudi-...
Amnesty International came up with several reports of the 'moderate' rebels committing severe crimes. Some of these reports were quite heavily sanitised.
There was no celebration of non-Islamic festivals allowed until Dec 2016. Only after the Syrian Army won back Aleppo did Christians get back their voice. The heavy, spontaneous door-to-door celebrations on the street were never reported. All videos showing such celebrations were taken down in a few hours from youtube.
What I find amusing is nearly all of your vaunted, reputed American journalists took most of their stories word for word from the Syrian observatory for Human rights run by one guy in Coventry, UK and heavily funded by the government. On the ground Syrians weren't considered reliable sources for the Western propaganda machine. Most journalists were too afraid to go into 'moderate rebel' held territory. And any Western journalist reporting from Assad territory was considered suspect and mostly ignored.
The Syrian War was an expensive gambit sponsored by Western governments (with Saudi Arabian support) for regime change that failed in all its objectives, causing over a million deaths and destroyed the Syrian quality of life. I have nothing but utter contempt for the journalists who kept pushing propaganda and are still calling for war.
Meanwhile, UK/US/German weapons are being merrily dropped in Yemen and hundreds of Yemeni adults and children dying, but you don't hear a peep in the MSM, do you ?
That’s the role of journalists.. to find such videos and verify them. To put people on the ground in Syria, fact finding and interviewing.
It’s not like America is the only country with free as in speech journalism online — go read other papers if you believe the American ones are so distorted. My guess is you won’t find basic facts so challenged.