Trial of the Status Quo: The Politics of Mediated Justice in the Special Tribunal for Lebanon
The Lebanese media landscape is widely acknowledged to be a battleground for privatized outlets aligned with political elites.1 Each outlet vies for hegemony in a crowded and competitive marketplace of competing narratives. Lebanese outlets may, on occasion, find points of agreement. But issues of political power, national identity, and policy prompt contestation and conflict in this deeply divided nation.2Lebanese media presents a paradox. Media outlets are among the freest in the Arab region with a wide spectrum of views represented. Yet outlets tend to be highly partisan.3 This configuration ensures media pluralism at a cost: the predominance of agenda driven media outlets that reflect sectarian and political affiliations.4 Nabil Dajani claims that Lebanese media outlets synthesize three forms of media freedom: the freedoms to inform, to propagate tribal/sectarian dogma, and to seek profit.5 In effect, Lebanese media outlets meld politics, identity, and economics to promote their respective visions of political events.Lebanese media challenges not just the notion of objectivity in journalism but also the notion that objectivity is a journalistic tenet. Indeed, Ramez Maalouf argues that "media outlets [in Lebanon] don't even claim to seek objectivity."6 Eighty five percent of the sixty one journalists interviewed by the Maharat Foundation, a Lebanese media NGO, echoed this sentiment. These journalists acknowledged that their own news agencies were neither independent nor objective.7 Dajani argues that Lebanese media outlets reflect the "sociopolitical structure of Lebanese society," and that these entrenched sociopolitical divisions regulate the "structure, content, and operation of media institutions."8 As a result, Lebanese media outlets not only destabilize notions of objectivity and bias, but also consolidate and reinforce disparate sectarian political interpretations of state history, national identity, and notions of justice and injustice.Media scholars agree that the licensed newspapers in Lebanon reflect the political leanings of major shareholders and political patrons and thus serve as "propaganda outlets" that exacerbate communal tensions.9 Yasmine Dabbous claims that Lebanese newspapers operate within a two sided "unwritten social contract." In this contract, media owners or appointed editors shape the newspaper's coverage in concert with political affiliations10 and journalists write articles that appeal to sectarian or party norms. Dabbous argues that these are the reasons why Lebanese media consumers tend to read more than one newspaper in order to get a broader view of developments.11 Lebanese newspapers thus serve as more than simple news sources; they are circuits for the dissemination of political messages to consumers who follow multiple media outlets.12 Lebanese media outlets are thus key sites for the analysis of Lebanese politics.Despite the importance of these framing structures, their precise form and shape remains underexplored. Lebanese media outlets are too easily written off as biased and thus useless for empirical research. There are, however, a few notable exceptions to this lack of scholarly attention. May Fawaz employs a sociopolitical framework to show how Lebanese media outlets, specifically television, exacerbate political tensions. Fawaz demonstrates that media outlets act as political, sectarian, and ideological platforms with their own divergent epistemological narratives.13 Patrick Jones similarly demonstrates that local media outlets promulgate sectarian politics through critiques of state bureaucracy and consolidate authority in the hands of political parties.14 This article draws upon this existing empirical media research to analyze the structure and form of differences between Lebanese newspapers with regard to coverage of a recent divisive event: the Special Tribunal for Lebanon. This article mobilizes media framing theory, content analysis, and discourse analysis to unpack Lebanese newspaper coverage through an overarching question: how did Lebanese newspaper coverage frame the tribunal?