Another Feisty Lebanese Newspaper Bites the Dust
First irony: a Lebanese chief editor of a newspaper that folded Saturday following financial setbacks headed another daily that bit the dust in 2005 due to money and management problems.
“Newspapers usually close due to a decline in readership, serious damage to their credibility, competition from similar publications that reduce the need for them, their inability to compete, and their failure to project a new attitude regarding the situation, quality, type and diversity,” wrote Bechara Charbel in a front-page farewell editorial of Nidaa Al Watan (Call of the Nation) headlined “A final word…and thank you.”
But, he added, a newspaper rarely disappears at the peak of its glory due to a sudden stumble resembling an assassination.
Such was Nidaa Al Watan when it announced on July 1, 2019 it was not just a newspaper, but an enduring cause true to its calling of “defending sovereignty, freedom, and the goal of nation building.”
The paper ruffled its fair share of feathers among Lebanon’s political, economic and social ranks.
Many accused it of being a mouthpiece of the Christian Lebanese Forces, a right-wing militia turned political party whose leader and members, like many Lebanese parties, traded their battle fatigues for business suits, but whose doctrines were immutable.
The paper, the editor wrote, supported anti-establishment “revolutionaries” who took to Beirut’s streets in 2019 to protest crippling corruption and a financial meltdown; stood with victims of an August 4, 2020 blast dubbed “Beirutshima,” two days before the 75th anniversary of the atomic bomb the U.S. dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima during World War II, and, as “Lebanon’s Chernobyl,” given the 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate parked in a hangar at the capital’s port; and, targeted the country’s financial and banking elite, including the central bank governor, for orchestrating an epic Ponzi scheme that’s impoverished most Lebanese citizens.
The daily had gone from a paper and online outlet to just a digital carcass in its last month of existence when the financial noose tightened.
Second irony: the paper is up for grabs and a key bidder heads a leading Lebanese TV channel whose newscasts and talk shows have promoted the very banks, businesses, trade associations and politicians Nidaa Al Watan slammed on a daily basis.
“He told us that he was negotiating about it, then it was announced in the media and he neither confirmed it nor denied it, so I guess it’s true,” a source at MTV Lebanon said.
Media reports said the new owners would change the paper’s editorial policy thereby affecting its sports and entertainment content as well as its much-maligned business section that poked holes in the establishment’s hollow rhetoric.
Social media denizens wasted no time in deriding the potential sale.
Tweeted (yes tweeted) Nadim Serhal: “There can’t be a mockery worse than this and playing people for fools. The next thing you know they (MTV) will be broadcasting news about a bank launching a beach cleaning campaign and participating in a demining campaign — Lebanon still has countless unexploded mines from its 1975–90 civil war — and more and more misleading news. This is Lebanon and congratulations to them and ATM TV. The casino always wins.”
How unfortunate for Bechara Charbel, who was the founding editor of Al Balad (The Country), another “liberal” Lebanese daily revived in 2003 from a previous financial/political hiatus with much fanfare by luring readers with tabloidy fare and attractive prizes only to start charging a subscription fee a year later and succumbing to the chopping block in 2005.
A French edition of Al Balad published in 2008 also went under for financial reasons in 2011 and an Arabic edition in Kuwait met the same fate.
The tabloid sprang back to life in Lebanon in 2010 but shut down yet again eight years later, by which time Charbel had left, and staff weren’t paid salaries or benefits they claimed had been pilfered by the new owners who had close ties to Syria’s Assad regime.
Another ill-fated newspaper, Al Ittihad Al Lubnani (The Lebanese Union), a broadsheet that had been revived after years of slumber to compete against already economically hobbled print media, published its last issue in December 2018 a mere two months after its launch amid a swirl of charges its publisher/editor-in-chief had wrecked it due to politics, mismanagement, hubris and financial fumbling.
Things went downhill the first month when the deputy editor-in-chief who’d previously headed the local news desk at Assafir, another Lebanese daily that bit the dust, clashed with the chief editor, a total novice in the newspaper business.
A number of Assafir alumni had formed the editorial board at the outset and expected to work as a cohesive team but it was undermined by the editor-in-chief.
Politics also played a role. Al Ittihad was close to Hezbollah, according to media analysts, suggesting the paper may have been a money laundering vehicle for the pro-Iran militia.
Assafir, an ailing legacy media paper, gave up the ghost after a 43-year run.
It had gone into remission a few times with repeated infusions of funds from assorted patrons when faced with bankruptcy, but succumbed to the Grim Reaper hovering over the country’s print media in 2016.
It couldn’t have come at a worse time for staffers who hadn’t been paid in over a year like hundreds of their counterparts at other papers, and as the industry went into a free-fall.
Assafir was established in 1974 as a platform for pan-Arab nationalist causes, with Egypt’s late leader Gamal Abdel Nasser as the publisher/editor-in-chief’s role model.
As with most Lebanese papers, circulation, sales and advertising revenue couldn’t sustain operations, so there was always a need for benefactors, local and/or foreign.
Assafir’s initial funding came from Libya and the Palestine Liberation Organization, and later from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and billionaire prime minister Rafic Hariri.
As money got tighter and management issues caused internal frictions, reporters and editors began jumping ship or were indirectly pushed out.
In 2019, Al Mustaqbal (The Future) newspaper shuttered its print edition, maintained a wobbly online presence and eventually expired.
While expected, it still came as a blow to editorial and administrative staff whose ranks were pared to a skeletal existence amid a crunching budget squeeze that deprived them of salaries and benefits for months, forcing them to juggle multiple jobs just to make ends meet.
The paper derived its name from the political movement founded by the late Lebanese-Saudi prime minister Rafic Hariri who was assassinated in 2005.
His son Saad, another Lebanese premier, was part owner of the paper, launched in 1999, as were Rafic’s widow, his other children, and several former advisers.
The family’s media interests extended to a TV channel by the same name, radio stations and several websites, all eventual victims of waste, mismanagement, cronyism and political intrigue leading to mass layoffs, and collapse.
The daily’s crisis was exacerbated by piling debts, totaling millions of dollars, notably the cost of printing, as well as a slide in print media in general, and a financial crisis that beset the Al Mustaqbal (Future) political party.
Al Hayat was the go-to pan-Arab newspaper noted journalists, analysts and anyone worth his/her salt wrote for, and that readers seeking professional reporting on events picked up for balanced coverage, diverse views and hard-hitting editorials — all relatively speaking, of course.
But in 2018 it shut down its Beirut bureau established in 1998 where 100 editorial and managerial people worked in a prime downtown location that also housed Laha, a women’s magazine it owned.
It was painful for staffers given the paper’s birthplace and its journalists’ decades-long perseverance under tough conditions, not least of which was Lebanon’s civil war.
Kamel Mroue launched Al Hayat in 1946 and paid the ultimate price when he was assassinated in his office two decades later because of his outspoken journalism. The paper sauntered until the civil war got in the way, and ceased publishing in March 1976.
Mroue’s son Jamil relaunched it in 1986 as a regional publication with international bureaus in partnership with Saudi Prince Khalid bin Sultan, whose late father was the powerful defense minister. Mroue later pulled out and conceded to ‘lease’ the brand name Al Hayat.
Kamel Mroue had also established the Beirut-based The Daily Star in 1952 and an umbrella company that included a marketing and research firm, and a public relations enterprise.
In 1996, Jamil Mroue decided to relaunch the only English-language broadsheet — on hiatus during the civil war — with seed money from the forced sale of Al Hayat. It gained a footing in the Lebanese market and earned a financially sufficient share to keep going.
In 2000, Mroue twinned with the International Herald Tribune (IHT), a joint venture of The New York Times and The Washington Post (eventually morphing into the International New York Times), to publish across the Arab Middle East.
It led to lucrative co-publishing contracts with publishers in Kuwait, Qatar, Egypt, and the UAE.
By 2005, as Internet use proliferated, and benefits from co-publishing agreements shriveled, The Daily Star took a hit. So, Mroue sold it to then Prime Minister Saad Hariri in 2010.
Eleven years later the paper that had stopped its print edition and turned all digital was also no more.
Final irony: Bechara Charbel, Nidaa Al Watan’s former chief editor, wrote an editorial-obituary in 2020 about the death of the paper edition headlined “The Daily Star, A Beacon Extinguished.”