Arab Media & Society

AbuKhalil's Angry Arab News Service, popular during the war.

Dear all,

Some of these pictures are very strong. I can not confirm reports talking about the use of unconventional weapons, but for those of you who dare to look, you will notice the nature of wounds and burns is not very ‘familiar’. Today the Israeli government said its "operations" will not end before at least one week. People are afraid the next few days will be worse than the past ones. They're expecting that as soon as the evacuation of the foreigners will be completed, the Israelis will have a ‘freer’ hand.[1]

Salman specifically asked her readers, many of whom kept blogs, to circulate the images widely, especially to Western viewers who would almost certainly not encounter them in their mainstream press or on television.  Many bloggers inside and outside Lebanon prominently featured Salman’s messages, and would make hers one of the most powerful voices emanating from Beirut during the war. 

More than ever before, blogging came to play an integral role in the coverage of the war (see also Sune Haugbolle). This reflects long-term trends in Internet use which are profoundly affecting the way news is created and consumed.  Consider these statistics:  Britons between 15 and 24 report spending 30% less time reading newspapers once they start using the web and the payrolls of the American newspaper industry fell by 18% between 1990 and 2004.[2]  These figures correspond to the first phase of traditional media migration onto the Internet where companies were forced to put much of their content online in response to Internet competition, usually at considerable extra cost.  The Israel-Hizbullah war is part of a second phase of traditional media’s embrace of the Internet, marked by a flurry of experimentation with ways to cash-in on the success of individual bloggers and popular aspects of the blog format such as serial narrative and user participation.  During the war, mainstream media outlets piggybacked off stories researched and broken by bloggers, ran pieces profiling prominent blogs, and in one case, recruited a student living in Beirut to keep a blog-style journal featured on a major U.S. network’s website.

Hanady Salman’s use of bloggers to get out her message, which was ill-suited to the norms of Western print or television, taken together with the efforts of traditional media to cash-in on the advantages of blogging, points to a maturing relationship between blogging and traditional broadcast and print formats.  This change is marked by an increasing ability of bloggers and traditional media outlets to cross or blur lines of format strategically in order to expand market share or, as in Salman’s case, to reach new audiences altogether. To be sure, harsh criticism of the mainstream media continues to motivate many bloggers who see themselves as watchdogs of a biased and analytically lazy mainstream media. There are also difficulties going the other way, as traditional media outlets are reluctant to relinquish control of content to bloggers for ideological or editorial reasons. Nevertheless, a look at blog- and traditional media-coverage of the Israel-Hizbullah war suggests attitudes of mutual hostility between bloggers and traditional media now coexist (albeit uncomfortably) with an appreciation of the possibilities of each others’ medium and increasing cross-format experimentation.  This article provides several examples of the cross-format trend through both online and traditional-media coverage of the conflict and also sketches some of the ways members of the diverse and influential Lebanese blogosphere wrote about the war and its coverage in print and on television.[3] 

New Realms of Interaction, New Inequalities of Access

While blogging allowed for wider participation in covering the war, these effects were not distributed equally across Lebanese society.  In Lebanon, blogging tends to be a hobby of the wealthy, socially conscious, and usually urban elite.  In the sectarian terms pervasive in Lebanese politics, this translates to a heavier online representation of Maronite Christians and Sunni Muslims.  Many of the most vocal bloggers during the Israel-Hizbullah war, such as Mustapha, the web master of Beirut Spring, cut their teeth writing about the “Cedar Revolution” protest movement that forced the withdrawal of Syrian troops and intelligence apparatus following the February 2005 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Al Hariri.  In a typical blog, dashes of Arabic and French flavor the English, a product of the tri-lingual schooling wealthy Lebanese receive. 

The sectarian nature of Lebanese politics often shapes the outlook of Lebanese bloggers.  In a post from Vox’s Den, a blog claiming to be driven by concern that “The rise of Islamism is threatening to bring oriental Christians back to the dark ages,” the author writes: “’80 per cent of the Lebanese support Hizbullah’ or so said a poll that was carried out during the war.  But I know Lebanon better: all the Lebanese I talked to during the war were in the 20 per cent camp.”[4]  Public opinion polls are common in Lebanon and contesting them is a hobby shared by bloggers across the political spectrum, but there is something more here.  As Marc Lynch remarks, the Lebanese blogosphere is unique in the Arab world for being “very self-conscious in opening itself to the Western media and trying to present itself as the interpreter of Lebanon.”[5]  This observation is helpful to keep in mind not only when reading Lebanese blogs but also Western coverage of Lebanon by journalists potentially influenced by the vocal Lebanese blogosphere.  It also underscores the importance of remembering that blogging is not equally spread across Lebanon’s extremely diverse political landscape. 

But it was not just the Lebanese in Lebanon who blogged about the Israel-Hizbullah war.  Around the world, bloggers in the large Lebanese diaspora created by the 1975-1990 civil war recorded their own perspectives of the 34-day war. They often blasted traditional news outlets in the West for their coverage of the conflict, which they could compare with Arabic news sources and reports from friends and family still in Lebanon.  The strong participation of the Lebanese diaspora in blogging the war demonstrates the potential of the medium in bringing together shifting and disparate commentaries, and in juxtaposing multiple overlapping identities. The ability of the Lebanese diaspora and others outside the Middle East to follow Lebanese sources, and of Lebanese bloggers to influence new worldwide audiences demonstrates the globalizing potential of the medium. This potential is what traditional media outlets, often limited to national or regional audiences, are struggling to come to terms with.[6]

Taunts and Sideswipes: Bloggers and Mainstream Media on the Conflict

 The Israel-Hizbullah conflict may have been the most intensely blogged-about war in history.  Despite heavy Israeli air strikes, the lights and phone lines in Beirut mostly stayed on, leaving an army of Lebanese to present their political analyses, experiences and practical wartime information for the wired world to see.  Glancing at the sidebar of Blogging Beirut, a personal site that switched to war coverage during the conflict, a user could check which bridges were hit the night before and which food supplies were running low alongside traditional blog fare. 

Outside Lebanon, bloggers told their own version of events, sometimes in stark contrast to what major television networks and newspapers were saying.  When the conflict broke out on July 12^th 2006, As’ad AbuKhalil, a Lebanese-American professor of Political Science and blogger, had just returned from Lebanon.  As he followed the war, his site, the Angry Arab News Service, went into overtime, shooting from an average of around ten daily posts to over thirty at the height of the conflict (see also Sune Haugbolle).  AbuKhalil is no fan of organized politics and religion, but reserves some of his harshest criticisms for the American media which he sees as driven by profit motive to reinforce the views of its consumers.  In his view, profit underpins the American media’s bias towards Israel at the expense of Arabs.  “Finally, an American news source pays attention to the victims of the Israeli war of aggression on Lebanon,” AbuKhalil writes, tagging the MSNBC headline, "Israeli zoo animals show signs of stress."[7]

But his favorite target by far is The New York Times, whose editorial page he accuses of cheerleading the destruction of Lebanon and its reporters of going to great lengths to humanize Israeli soldiers while ignoring the human costs in Lebanon and Palestine.  The following is a sentence from an article in The New York Times followed by AbuKhalil’s commentary:

’Ohad [an Israeli soldier] said he called his wife to say goodnight before going into battle, and called her when he came out to say he was O.K.’

Don't you feel bad for this occupier? Are you not getting goose bumps reading about the emotional strain of killing women and children in Lebanon? Do think it is easy to kill for hours on end, especially in a land of inferior people? Do you now know how difficult it is for Israel to maintain its racist occupation of Arab lands?[8]