The financial crisis has reached the Beirut media.
The Daily Star is not the only the only Lebanese media house facing hard times (see “Star Turn,” page 40, Commmunicate, Apr. 2009). At the end of September 2009, Lebanon’s oldest and most prestigious newspaper, An-Nahar, announced a restructuring plan to help the daily cope with a $5 million debt load. It laid off 54 employees, including well-known names such as novelist Elias Khoury, who edited Al-Mulhak, the culture supplement of the paper.
Not long afterwards, the recently relaunched MTV, a generalist television channel owned by independent MP Gabriel Murr, followed suit, laying off eight people. Murr’s production house, Studiovision, also made 50 employees redundant.
Next in line was LBCI, the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation’s flagship satellite channel, where 120 people – mostly guards and members of the station’s security team, as well as three well-known broadcasters, including Denise Fakhri Rahmeh, a reporter for the station for 16 years – were given their marching orders. Finally, on October 15, news channel ANB announced the layoff of 20 staffers, including journalists.
The media cuts prompted Robert Fisk, the award-winning investigative journalist with the UK’s The Independent newspaper, to dramatically proclaim “The end of an era for Lebanon’s free press.”
“Once a bastion of journalistic independence, Beirut’s newspapers are losing their edge,” Fisk wrote. However, that bastion has long been under siege in an industry thriving on politically motivated financial contributions. The assassination of business tycoon and former prime minister Rafik Hariri in 2005 accelerated the polarization of Lebanese politics, and few media outlets managed to remain unbiased. Media watchers say an inherent dependence on politics is one of the main causes of the current crisis.
CUTTING THE LIFELINE. The job cuts have sparked outrage and indignation among Lebanon’s media community, with Elias Khoury claiming that An-Nahar’s sacking of employees is “an offense and an attack on our dignity,” and publicly demanding an apology from the newspaper. But most analysts agree a restructuring was long overdue, and should have happened as far back as 2006. Roula Mikhail, director of independent media watchdog Maharat Foundation and a journalist at An-Nahar, says, “In the case of An-Nahar, reorganization plans were announced three years ago, so it did not come as a surprise. The paper’s financial problems are longstanding and well-known.”
Over recent years, says Jihad Bitar, head of media analysis outfit Comtrax Solutions, “A lot of political pressure was exerted and large amounts of political money were specifically made available in the run-up to the parliamentary elections in June of this year. This kept the various media organizations temporarily alive on a lifeline.”
This political funding succeeded in masking the fact that the Lebanese advertising market is simply too small to sustain the large number of media houses that exist within it. “It looked like the market was increasing, from the pure volume and size of advertising, but if you take into account the massive discounts that were routinely given, you notice that the financial weight of the market has remained stable at best,” says Bitar. “Now the elections are over, less political money is flowing in and the media are forced to implement the economic and organizational readjustments they should have carried out before.”
The ongoing financial downturn has seen clients slash advertising budgets across the board, but even firms that don’t directly deal in advertising have been hit. MTV-affiliated Studiovision is a case in point; the production house primarily works for Saudi billionaire Prince Walid bin Talal’s various Rotana satellite channels. Bin Talal is the largest single shareholder in financial conglomerate Citigroup, and was directly hit by the subprime crisis. As a result, he has now been forced to cut back significantly on many of his other enterprises. Rotana apparently owes Studiovision substantial back payments, and Studiovision is suffering as a result.
Print is suffering around the world because the financial crisis has reined in advertising spend, and also because the Internet provides a more and more threatening alternative source of news, and newspaper readership is dropping both within Lebanon and without.
ULTERIOR MOTIVES. It’s not just the economy that is putting pressure on Beirut’s media; business strategy and politics both play a role as well.
MTV – which was forced to close by a hostile Lebanese government in 2002 – hired a large workforce for its relaunch in April of this year. “But now that it is up and running, fewer employees are needed,” says Bitar. “The company is now laying off this surplus.”
LBC’s chairman Pierre Daher cited economics as his reason for firing more than 100 employees, although many of those employees claim he was acting for ulterior reasons. All of the dismissed staff have links with the Lebanese Forces, the political party that founded the station in 1985 and in 2007 began a lawsuit to wrest power back from Daher. “We didn’t make any mistakes on air … We always followed the instructions of LBC policy,” one of the laid off staff told reporters. A statement released by the fired employees claims that “The administration of LBC did not abide by any humanitarian considerations.” Bitar also says, “The choice of employees to be laid off is clearly politically motivated.”
Politics aside, Bitar believes it was time for the station’s management to “cut the dead wood.” And LBC is not in the best of shape; the broadcaster’s Jeddah office was closed in August by the Saudi Arabian authorities after a Saudi national bragged about his sex life on a chat show. Rupert Murdoch, the press mogul at the head of multinational media conglomerate Newscorp, is reportedly set to buy a share in Rotana, which owns a majority share in LBC. “In the resulting new strategy, LBC will be the flagship brand of Rotana in the Middle East, and as such it needs to be strong and lean,” says Bitar.
Similarly, An-Nahar is being tidied up by a new boss. Nayla Tueni, a 26-year-old MP, recently took over management of the paper from her grandfather Ghassan Tueni, who founded it in 1933. She is shaking up the management and filling key positions with people she trusts.
A decade ago, An-Nahar was the only Arabic-language quality daily in Lebanon, but it now faces competition from rival titles such as As-Safir and Al-Liwa. “Nayla Tueni has made the right decision in reorganizing the paper; she needed to do a drastic overhaul,” says Bitar. “The paper needs new blood and a new vision, and this is a start, although more needs to be done for the paper to become competitive and economically sustainable again.”
WHAT NEXT? Whatever the reasons behind this swathe of layoffs, there are now more than 200 former employees of media companies unemployed and those ranks are likely to swell as further restructuring takes place within the industry.
Roula Mikhail’s Maharat Foundation is currently working to prepare a report on the lay-offs, circulating questionnaires to all personnel involved in order to investigate the legality of each case. The report is scheduled to be published next month.
The cutbacks have served to emphasize the lack of a union for those who work in the Lebanese communications industry. “Those of us working for audiovisual media do not have a syndicate at all,” says Mikhail. There is a Union of the Lebanese Press, that she says is largely inactive and hard to join. The Union’s president, Melhem Karam, is not a journalist himself, but the owner of Dar Alf Leila Wa Leila, a publishing house that produces around 30 magazines. “How can he be expected to represent journalists, when they are actually his employees?” asks Mikhail. “There is a clear conflict of interest here, which explains why the Union did not even comment on the lay-offs.”
With so many out of work in media, and a strong possibility that more will join them over the coming months, the numbers to found a union are certainly there. Its prospective members probably wish this wasn’t the case.