Lebanon’s Freedom Of Press

Nahida Nakad, director of the Arabic-language channel France 24, on why she’s happy that the channel chose Lebanon as their regional base:

“There is one country where freedom has a sense that is much deeper than most of the other countries and we have certainly paid a very high price for that,” […] Nakad added that she has been working in Lebanon for over a year and a half without receiving phone calls from the government to restrict any content broadcast by the channel

I always made the point we do have indeed a relatively free press in Lebanon. I say relatively because we still ban TV shows, books and movies that insult our clergy. But all in all, our free press is not the result of some intrinsic enlightenment. It’s simply because the competitive nature of our sectarian system provides a natural “checks and balances” framework for the free distribution of news.

If Future TV won’t run a story that insults Mr. Hariri, OTV, Almanar and Aljadded would be more than glad to pick it up (and make the point that Future TV didn’t run it). This results in a system that is generally free and liberal.