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from THE NATIONAL-UAE
Five months in Abu Dhabi can make the busy pavement of Hamra
Street incredibly cheering. Beggars, shoeshine boys and the colourful
characters manning news stands turn into angels of a lost paradise
– street life – one of whose ritual pleasures is buying the morning
papers.
Like few places in Lebanon, here they dispense every sect and ideology
of newsprint. I refresh my memory as I pick some up: As Safir (Shiite,
socialist), An Nahar (Christian, liberal), Al Akhbar (Hizbollah,
leftist), Al Mustaqbal (Sunni, conservative) as well as the tabloidish
Al Balad (produced by the owners of the all-classifieds, free Al
Waseet) and London-based pan-Arab papers like Al Quds Al Arabi,
Al Sharq Al Awsat and Al Hayat.
The Lebanese experiment in confessional government, with its origins
in the lack of a majority sect at the time of independence in 1943,
may have forestalled the autocratic fate suffered in places like
Syria and Egypt without eliminating sectarian sentiment. In place
of a one-party system, a sect-addled democracy took hold. And the
results have ranged from civil war to a chain of freer, stronger
papers, the most pluralistic in the Arab world.
That is why Beirut has never produced state papers like Al Ahram
in Cairo or Teshrin in Damascus. It has, however, capitalised on
outside funding – much of it from the Gulf – to sustain a tradition
of secular debate, one that attempts to assert the enduring relevance
of newsprint in the face of dwindling distribution figures worldwide,
and the consequent loss of advertising revenue. The Arab world would
not seem to be immune to these trends, and I have come to Beirut,
you might say, just to buy these newspapers, to read them, and to
talk to the journalists and editors who produce them. Journalists
in the West have become wearily familiar with the endless drumbeat
of bad news for their industry and, somewhat masochistically, they
can’t seem to stop writing articles about it.
While they worry that corporate owners have cut quality to boost
profits, the greater concern of their Arab counterparts has been
political rather than economic: that owners and investors (in many
cases governments themselves) will impose their views; it is the
independence of the journalism, rather than its declining quality,
that is the source of anxiety. Lebanon – with its unique tradition
of pluralism – is an interesting place to consider the state of
the Arab press, but that very pluralism is a side effect of the
country’s plentiful sectarian divisions, each with its own platform
and point of view. “There is a difference,” notes Hazem Saghieh,
a 30-year veteran of the Lebanese press who now serves as political
editor of Al Hayat, “between a genuinely liberal or free climate,”
where you can say whatever you want, and a place “where you can
always get a few words in edgewise because there’s a civil war going
on.” *************************************
On March 16, 2006, the Druze leader Walid Jumblatt appeared on the
popular LBC talk show Kalam Alnas, and he seemed unusually agitated
over plans for the launch of Beirut’s newest paper. “Who says the
Syrians are really gone,” he declaimed. “Together with the Iranians,
they are funding a new newspaper called Al Akhbar.” The new paper,
Jumblatt said, was a tool of Hizbollah, the core of the opposition
and an ally of Iran and Syria. He repeated rumours that its mandate
was to promote Khomeinism, brainwashing readers into supporting
the allegedly fanatical militants dragging Lebanon into war with
Israel. The paper, he claimed, would take an Islamist position on
individual liberties and endorse Baath-style repression.
Outside Lebanon it would seem extraordinary for a major politician
to launch a pre-emptive strike against a paper that had not yet
appeared – try to imagine Gordon Brown on the BBC, railing against
a new paper that sought to claim the legacy of the old Labour Party
– but the stakes were evidently high. Al Akhbar was the brainchild
of the widely admired left-wing journalist Joseph Samaha, who quit
his job editing As Safir – one of Lebanon’s two leading dailies,
which he helped found in 1974 – for the chance to launch his own
paper. But months before its debut, Samaha’s vision of a critical,
reader-friendly paper was already being overshadowed by his stated
sympathies for the opposition and the newspaper’s purported association
with Hizbollah. Al Akhbar, which published its first issue on August
14, 2006, is an interesting case study: it is the youngest, and
in some ways the most exciting, serious newspaper in Lebanon. But
its support for the Islamist-led opposition has made it particularly
vulnerable to the political polarisation of the Lebanese media –
the very thing Samaha hoped to transcend.
Lebanese papers have traditionally been family businesses, partly
controlled by their financiers, but with political lines shaped
by internal debates between editors and investors – and within multi-confessional
newsrooms. The doyen of the Lebanese press, An Nahar – founded in
1933 by Gibran Tueni, whose family still owns the paper – set standards
for journalism that seem to have no counterpart in the Egyptian
press, an obvious point of comparison.
Where each of Lebanon’s papers reflected the shifting and competing
views of their investors, editors, and reporters, their Egyptian
counterparts have tended since the 1950s to follow a line set by
individual editors and executives with an eye toward pleasing the
government. By the 1980s, this system had become so corrupt that
most reporters were little more than barely literate PR workers
for officials. But an alternative press emerged in Cairo in the
1990s, fuelled by the rise of online activists and American pressure
on the Egyptian government for democratic reform.
Papers like Al Usbou and Ad Dustour waged lurid battles on government
figures, who for the first time in recent memory featured in irreverent
cartoons and satires, while less sensationalist papers, notably
Al Masri Al Yom (the most widely read today) built a reputation
for accurate reporting. Together they raised professional standards
and reaffirmed the credibility of the press. They could not afford
the lush printing and service-orientated copy the state papers increasingly
incorporated, but they created a ripple effect in the state’s three
gargantuan institutions (Al Ahram, Akhbar Al Yom and Ag Gumhureya).
For the first time since the 1940s, Beirut seemed to lag behind.
Lebanese journalists felt nothing major had happened since An Nahar’s
last overhaul in the 1960s. Only Al Balad, a Berliner-format daily
founded in 2003, suggested anything new. Designed by Saatchi and
Saatchi Beirut (the company behind Independence 05), Al Balad promised
sharp and snappy reading for a young millennium. It delivered compelling
graphics without substance: an Arab equivalent of The Sun, with
risqué covers, competitions to win consumer goods and scandal pieces
flaunting sectarian bias.
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