The fall of the Lebanese press

My favourite journalist Robert Fisk looks at the state of the press in Lebanon in this morning's Independent and doesn't find a particually good picture

For decades, Lebanese journalism has been applauded as the freest, most outspoken and most literate in the heavily censored Arab world. Alas, no more. Beirut's best-read daily has just shed more than 50 staff and LBC, one of the country's best-known television stations, has just fired three of its most prominent presenters. The Lebanese media are being hit – like the rest of the world – by the internet and falling advertising revenues. But this is Lebanon, where politics is always involved. Is something rotten in the state of the Lebanese press?

The problem is part economic,part stuctural.As Fisk continues

The problem is not so much the politics of Lebanon but the feudal state of the press. You cannot start a newspaper in Beirut – you have to buy an existing title from someone else. This costs money. So the rich own newspapers. Not much different, you may say, from the rest of the world. But the system in Lebanon is archaic; there are families in Beirut who own newspapers but don't publish them – they are still waiting for a buyer.

Fisk takes a nostalgic look at the past

Robert Fisk asks an important question in this morning's Independent.

His article War reporters used to prefer morality over impartiality asks whether the modern war reporter lives up to the language and writing of the old time correspondent

It's not just the power of the writing I'm talking about here; the screaming soldiers, the dying Communard, the condemned men, the woman wanting to sell her car, the death of an age, the flowers. These reporters were spurred, weren't they, by the immorality of war. They cared. They were not frightened of damaging their "impartiality". I wonder if we still write like this.

asks Fisk.

Worth a read

Gaza reporting like a football match

Robert Fisk was on the world service last night and described the reporting from the Middle East as being like a football match.

You can read a summary transcript HERE courtesy of media workers against the War but here is an excerpt

If the western journalists were in Gaza they would be able to talk not to the man the street but to the man and the woman and the child in the hospital. And we can’t do that, none of us can. And that is the problem.
It’s not that the images are a distortion – the images are real. The distortion is when we’re told afterwards that the Palestinians deserve it or indeed that the Palestinians had it coming to them because Hamas was using them, Hamas was in the school.

A brilliant bit of writing

Great bit of journalism in today's Independent by one of my journalistic heroes Robert Fisk.

Writing about the exchange of prisoners and bodies between Israel and Lebanon

Yesterday was the last day of the 2006 Lebanon war, the final chapter of Israel's folly and Hizbollah's hubris, a grisly day of corpse-swapping and refrigerated body parts and coffin after bleak wooden coffin on trucks crossing the Israeli border, which left old Ali Ahmed al-Sfeir and his wife, Wahde, stooped and broken with grief. Ali had a grizzled grey beard and stood propped on a stick while Wahde held a grey-tinged photograph of a young man – her son Ahmed, born in 1970. "He was a martyr, but I do not know which lorry he will be on," she said. In the slightly torn picture, he looked whey-faced, unsmiling, already dead.

Read the whole piece ,Brilliant journalism as usual

Alleged or not

A very good piece in the Belfast Telegraph (thanks to Martin Stabe) from one of my favourite journalists Robert Fisk

I despise the internet. It's irresponsible and, often, a net of hate. And I don't have time for Blogopops. But here's a tale of two gutless newspapers which explains why more and more people are Googling rather than turning pages.

The first story concerns LA Times reporter Mark Arax who investigated aspects of the 1915 Armenian genocides.(A story always close to Robert's heart).The story was

"killed on the orders of managing editor Douglas Frantz because the reporter had a "position on the issue" and "a conflict of interest".

What the problem actually concerned was the use of the word "genocide".The Turkish authorities have always denied complecity in this affair putting the deaths of over one and half million Armenians as down to civil disputes.Whereas the evidence points to a planned massacre hidden by the Great War.

The deabte still rages to this day with supporters of Turkey and those who supprt its interests still in denial mode.