Lebanese media under scrutiny during the country's elections in June 2009. Photo:IMS

A study mapping out Lebanese media's coverage of the June elections earlier this year triggered a heated debate amongst the media monitored, some of which question the accuracy of the report's conclusions

Fatima Rida, journalist, reporting for IMS 

Much hope was placed in the new Electoral Media Law in Lebanon when it was introduced prior to the June 2009 elections. The new law obligated Lebanese media to deliver fair and balanced coverage and dictated that media outlets provide equal access to media for all candidates and set a standard rate for electoral advertisements. In the wake of the new law, an unprecented step was taken to establish a committee overseeing the work of the media during elections.

Lebanese media coverage was thus monitored during the elections by local and international organisations and NGOs and other bodies with official status such as the Supervisory Commission for Electoral Campaign.

The monitoring of the electoral process and the media’s coverage was welcomed by both the Lebanese people and the Lebanese government, even though questions remained about the efficacy of this. In Lebanon, analyses, studies and research are easy to carry out, while the main difficulty lies in the ability of these efforts to induce change and find the means that must be adopted in order to achieve reforms.

A study of media coverage

"A Study of the Media Coverage of the Parliamentary Elections in Lebanon – June 2009”, prepared by the Lebanese NGO “Maharat” Foundation and the IMS-established Arab Working Group, was circulated to the Lebanese media community and presented at a press launch in late 2009 attended by a broad spectre of the media outlets monitored by the report. This article summarises some of the main discussion points raised at this press launch about the study.  

The study aimed to assess the performance of media institutions during the elections by comparing their coverage and their contents to the clauses of the new law and measuring any change in practices as a result of the new Media Law.

Seven television stations (Tele-Liban, LBC, OTV, Mtv, Al-Manar, Future TV and Al-Jadid [New] TV), two radio stations (Sawt al-Ghad and Voice of Lebanon) and the daily newspapers Al-Akhbar, Al-Safir, Al-Nahar and Al-Mustaqbal came to hear about the findings of the study.

Media monitoring methodology

The monitoring process was based on two methods: the quantitative analysis based on the amount of space allocated to each political party in media during the elections. The coverage emerging from this analysis was subsequently classified into positive, negative, or neutral media coverage.

The second method saw the media monitored divided into opposition or loyalist media, depending on the nature of their media coverage.

Inaccuracies

While the Maharat study attempted to implement strict scientific standards in its monitoring methodology divorced from hypotheses and personal and arbitrary observations, it did not manage to avoid criticism from observers. At the launch ceremony, Ms Diana Mukallid of Future TV stated that in her opinion the evaluation criteria used to carry out the media monitoring rendered the study inaccurate and did not manage to truly reflect the nature of the Lebanese media’s coverage of the elections.

- How can we be accused of negative news coverage when all we have done is to report the statement of one of the leaders with a sectarian agenda? This is a news story, and if we had not conveyed it, everyone else would have beaten us to it, Ms. Mukallid said.

Meanwhile, Elsie Mfarrej from the radio station Sawt el-Mada agreed with Mukallid’s reservations, adding that “there was an absence of accurate monitoring of facial expressions and the tonality used in broadcasting news stories”.

“Facial expressions also have an impact”

Mfarrej considered that in broadcast media the manner in which news is read should also be monitored, as it may have a negative or positive impact upon the viewers and the listeners.

While some felt that the organisation heading up the media monitoring, “Maharat”, had done a better and more accurate job at monitoring newspapers, they had also expressed some reservations towards the conclusions reached by the study which they found raised a number of questions.

The monitoring of newspapers concluded that Al-Safir and Al-Nahar were the most neutral in their coverage, while Al-Mustaqbal and Al-Akhbar were far from neutral because of their “commitment to certain political positions”.

Those who expressed reservations referred to the fact that the study’s foreword regarding these four newspapers bore a number of inaccuracies, most notably when Al-Akhbar was described as “a newspaper that depicts itself as liberal and is in complete support of the resistance project and its supporters, namely the March 8 parties. It also has a wide margin of criticism.”

Also, the classification of political parties in the study was found by some to be illogical. For example, the study listed the MP Michel Murr in the Metn district as being “independent”, while candidates affiliated with the Lebanese Communist Party were listed as belonging to the opposition. This, despite the fact that both of these candidates ran in the elections as competitors against the electoral lists of both the opposition and the loyalist camps.

New Electoral Media Law ignored

The inaccuracies that they refer to have thus raised questions about the efficacy of this study, since the latter seems to have slipped into the same pitfalls that characterised all other similar studies conducted by other groups and organisations.

The general conclusion of the study refers to Article IX of the electoral law, which governs the role of the media and that of journalists during elections. The most notable observation made was that the media institutions did not adhere to this law. This conclusion was considered by observers to be an already widely accepted postulate. In fact, it was exactly like the conclusions reached by the report published by the EU Election Observation Mission in Lebanon, a broadly controversial report renowned for reaching “already well-known” conclusions at the enormous cost of 7.4 million Euros.

Also, why was an important standard scientific criterion such as air time and print space allocated for each candidate, absent from the process of monitoring the performance of media institutions? Was the role of the Supervisory Commission for the Electoral Campaign truly effective in controlling the performance of the media, or does this role need a reassessment?

These are some of the questions that were posed. Moreover, some have considered that even if “Maharat” cannot be responsible for finding the appropriate answers for such questions, the report failed to mention “the analysis of the law and the means by which it can be enforced”. In other words, the report failed to link the law to the details stipulated in its provisions, and to analyse their effectiveness.

This did not prevent the Minister of Interior and Municipalities, Ziad Baroud, from  saying that this study, along with other studies and reports conducted during the elections, should be presented to Parliament when the time comes for the electoral law to be amended. The Minister also considered that such reports should be the basis of any new law.

Click here to read "A Study of the Media Coverage of the Parliamentary Elections in Lebanon – June 2009”.