NY Times profile of Left Wing, Hezbollah Supporting, Lebanese Newspaper

YankeeFan · Dec 29, 2010

Boy does the Times love this place!

Sure, they'd like to wipe Israel off the map, but they're edgy and provocative, and they support gay rights and feminist causes.

Ibrahim al-Amine, the hawk-eyed editorial chairman of Al Akhbar, describes his newspaper’s founding ambitions this way: “We wanted the U.S. ambassador to wake up in the morning, read it and get upset.”

He succeeded. Earlier this month Al Akhbar became the only Arab newspaper to obtain its own substantial batch of WikiLeaks cables and gleefully cataloged various embarrassments to the region’s kings, princes and politicians. Soon afterward, the paper’s popular Web site came under a cyberattack that became a story in its own right, and provided more free publicity.

It was the latest coup for a five-year-old paper that has become the most dynamic and daring in Lebanon, and perhaps anywhere in the Arab world. In a region where the news media are still full of obsequious propaganda, Al Akhbar is now required reading, even for those who abhor its politics.

They are a remarkable blend: the paper champions gay rights, feminism and other leftist causes, even as it wholeheartedly supports Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Shiite movement. Al Akhbar’s access to Hezbollah allows it to scoop other papers on Lebanon’s biggest continuing story, but it also publishes muckraking exposés on the abuse of domestic workers, prison overcrowding and other delicate subjects. Add splashy full-page color photos and witty tabloid-style headlines, and you have an alluring product.

...

The paper suffers from many of the same flaws as the mainstream Arab press: too much reliance on single sources, and news pages that often show a loose mingling of fact, rumor and opinion.

Still, it is refreshingly free of the slavish headlines that are so common across the Middle East: the king’s visit to the airport, the president’s trip to the mosque. Even the pan-Arab press, largely owned by Saudi Arabia, is seriously constrained in what it can say. Lebanon has long had the most freewheeling news media in the region, but its outlets are often vehicles for their owners, usually political bosses or businessmen with a sectarian ax to grind. Reporters are often pawns in this game: Rafik Hariri, the billionaire former prime minister who was assassinated in 2005, used to send around envelopes of cash to his favorites.

...

But no one apologizes for Al Akhbar’s vehement support for “the resistance,” as Hezbollah’s armed forces are known here. A portrait of Imad Mughniyeh, the legendary Hezbollah commando who was assassinated in 2008, hangs in the office of Mr. Amine, the chairman of the board.

“Our Che,” Mr. Amine says, as he leads a visitor into his office and proudly displays the portrait. After Mr. Mughniyeh was killed in Damascus, Syria, Al Akhbar published an amazing scoop: a personal interview with Mr. Mughniyeh, done months earlier and written by Mr. Amine, who was a personal friend.

If Mr. Saghieh and Mr. Nashabe are the paper’s Western-friendly faces, Mr. Amine is its hard-line bulldog, a grizzled Marxist whose columns are widely viewed as telegraphs from the Hezbollah leadership (or parts of it). He offers his visitors tea, then reels off some of his own fondest hopes: to replace the oppressive governments of the Arab world, redraw the colonial-era borders, remove Israel from the map and send the Jews back to Europe — they would be more comfortable, after all, in a capitalist environment.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/29/world/middleeast/29beirut.html?_r=1&hp
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NY Times profile of Left Wing, Hezbollah Supporting, Lebanese Newspaper

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NY Times profile of Left Wing, Hezbollah Supporting, Lebanese Newspaper

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