Reporters Without Borders has expressed concern over recent verdicts against journalists and media organisations by the country’s publications court. The court was established to settle disputes over defamation and libel cases. The press freedom organisation called for comprehensive reform of all laws concerning the practice of journalism in Lebanon. Currently, the press law (adopted in 1962...
A correspondent for the Lebanese New TV television station, Ibrahim Dsoki, has received death threats and insults directed at him personally, as well as at his family and work colleagues, from student union members and supporters of the Amal movement (a Lebanese Shi'a political movement founded by Musa al-Sadr). The threats arrived via Dsoki's private email account and on the website of the...
Targeted physical attacks were carried out Tuesday on journalists in several Lebanese cities including Beirut, the northern city of Tripoli and the southern city of Sidon, during violent protests that followed the announcement that a Hezbollah-backed candidate has been appointed prime minister, according to Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). The press freedom...
The Lebanese army intelligence department detained journalist Hassan Alleik, a reporter for the Al-Akhbar newspaper, and questioned him for six hours on August 11 about an article published in the newspaper the previous day, according to press freedom group Maharat Foundatin. The article was about the escape of an agent named Ghassan El Jed, who was previously accused by Hezbollah secretary...
A journalist of Lebanon’s Al-Akhbar newspaper was killed in clashes between the Israeli and Lebanese armies which erupted Tuesday, shattering several years of relative calm on the tense Israel-Lebanon border. The Lebanese news site NOW Lebanon named the journalist as Assaf Abu Rahal, according to the International Press Institute (IPI). Arab news reports also said Ali Chouayb, a journalist working...
The UN Security Council has established an international criminal tribunal empowered to prosecute individuals responsible for a series of deadly attacks against Lebanese journalists in 2005. The Security Council approved resolution 1757 on May 30, establishing an international criminal tribunal to prosecute the masterminds of the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq al-Hariri, who...
In retrospect, it should have been a given that Hizbullah would be capable of claiming “media superiority” and strength following the last war between Israel and Lebanon. However, various media sources were forced to jump at every opportunity to get information regarding Hizbullah leaders and the group’s political stand, after extended periods of silence on the part of Hassan Nasrallah and...
BEIRUT: It's been said that the vibrancy of a city's media culture is a good indication of that city's quality of life. A metropolis with a lot of magazines is a metropolis with a lot going on. If one were to survey the newsstands in Beirut earlier this summer, one would have been impressed with the number of new and established titles on display - a spate of fashion rags, business journals and...
The Arab world tuned into the events in Lebanon in July, and Hizbullah's Al-Manar TV station was one of the main beneficiaries, according to ratings released by Ipsos-Stat. As detailed in the Mena Report, a publication of the Al Bawaba Media and Technology group, the biggest surprise in the ratings, measured between July 15 and 28, during the war in Lebanon, was the emergence of Al-Manar as the No...
A month before the war in Lebanon broke out, the Al Jazeera channel began filming documentary programs, which have not yet been broadcast, about life in Israel and, among other things, the Hebrew press. In an interview that a reporter for the channel conducted with me, she read out questions that had been dictated by the office in Amman and the editorial desk in Qatar. I told her the Israeli press...
