Media : Free-Wheeling Press Faces Curbs in Beirut : The regime lifted its ban on political broadcasting, but Parliament will soon consider regulating licenses and content.

The evening news in Beirut has always been a brash bouillabaisse of political intrigue, scandal, light features and bombast, with a sprinkling of bullets, bombs and gore.

Sure, the government-owned TeleLiban offers the standard footage of the prime minister, president and House Speaker touring factories and greeting guests (while Beirut yawns). But for livelier news, and a different spin, most of Lebanon tunes in each night to the Lebanese Broadcasting Corp. (LBC) report, offered up from its sleek studios in the hills of East Beirut by the Christian Lebanese Forces militia and a powerful Maronite Christian politician.

Meantime, officials of the now disarmed Amal militia have a share in a TV station. So does the Israel-backed South Lebanese Army, and so do Prime Minister Rafik Hariri (he used to own two) and a whole host of parliamentary members, onetime warlords and political wanna-bes, from the right-wing Christian Phalangists (“The Voice of Lebanon”) to the National Syrian Socialist Party.

The Islamic fundamentalist militia, Hezbollah, puts out the evening news on its own Al Manar TV, with modestly veiled anchorwomen handing off to bearded reporters in the field reporting on the latest military assaults against Israeli targets by Islamic forces in the south.

Nowhere in the Arab world--or much of the rest of the globe, for that matter--has the press bred, multiplied, gathered the news and finally stormed into the nation’s living rooms with such gleeful abandon as in Lebanon. A 16-year civil war cultivated the freest press in the Arab world.

At times this year, 58 private television stations and about 200 radio stations, all unlicensed and unregulated, were operating in everything from modern studios to back-room booths in the slums to serve an audience of 3 million Lebanese--a media free-for-all that the Lebanese government has now declared must end.

Earlier this year, Hariri’s regime declared a ban on all political broadcasting in Lebanon, forcing most stations to either cancel their news broadcasts or substitute light entertainment features. Hariri’s own station, Future TV, was closed for three days after the news staff inadvertently carried a rousing speech by the prime minister calling for continuing the Islamic military resistance against Israel. Hezbollah sullenly reverted to religious programming, and a chamber full of Parliament deputies--accustomed to seeing their faces and pronouncements on the nightly news--fumed and plotted their revenge.

The ban was lifted July 29 after Hariri lost a showdown with the injured Parliament, but Parliament will consider a new media law when it resumes sessions next month. The draft law would, for the first time, regulate the broadcast media in Lebanon, requiring licenses, assigned frequencies, ownership controls and mandatory guidelines on content.

Government officials estimate that only about five of the television stations currently operating in Lebanon would survive the new standards.

And it is an ironic reflection of the nation’s exhaustion after 16 years of war and furious politicking that almost no one--save those who stand to be shut down--has complained.

Aside from a brief sit-in at the Parliament by television employees laid off after the ban on political broadcasting, no one has launched protests. No one has raised the issue of freedom of the press.

“The situation we have now is impossible. We have a fair amount of freedom of the press, but any broadcast medium in the world should take its license from the government,” said Mohammed Baalbecki, head of the Lebanese Press Syndicate.

Indeed, the reporters and editors of the press union may have cause for quiet glee. About 80% of the advertising revenues of the Lebanese print media have been siphoned off by the burgeoning television industry, and most syndicate members are hoping the new law will help lure advertisers back.

Now even some veteran TV newspeople say there is room for regulation--and restraint--on the Lebanese airwaves.

“The war in this country could return in a split of a second, just like it ended in a split of a second,” said Ali Jaber, managing director of Hariri’s Future TV. “Every 15 minutes there’s a news bulletin on the radio. People used to turn to it in time of war because they wanted to know where the bombs are falling.

“But now we are a country coming out of a state of war, and we need to relax a little bit. Two years ago, they were hacking each other in the streets! I truly don’t think democracy in its absolute sense suits this country at this time.”

Hariri ordered the ban on news and political broadcasting shortly after the Feb. 27 bombing of a Maronite church north of Beirut, in which 11 people were killed and more than 50 others were wounded. The incident, a frightening reminder of the years of terror that preceded it, was like a match to tinder. The prime minister was outraged at the Lebanese Forces’ LBC coverage, which showed maimed and bloodied children with the voice-over “Who is responsible?”

The implication was that it was the work of Islamic fundamentalists, and possibly the fault of the government for not exercising enough security control to keep the fundamentalists in check. The government saw the attack as precisely the kind of tit-for-tat mayhem that kindled Lebanon’s civil war in 1975 and regarded the news coverage as likely to encourage a replay.

Later, the government arrested Lebanese Forces leader Samir Geagea and accused him of having the bomb planted himself. The government’s own TeleLiban, exempted from the political news ban, broadcast a lengthy and decidedly one-sided indictment of Geagea called “The Trial of Samir Geagea” long before the trial, set for October, was to begin.

LBC’s Pierre Daher said the government was worried about LBC’s coverage of the bombing because the incident was not an isolated one. LBC had been reporting about anti-Christian leafletting in Tripoli and the desecration of Christian graves for two months before the bombing.

Jaber, the Future TV managing director, said he was at Hariri’s house in Beirut a few days after the ban was imposed, when Hariri’s own picture, making a speech, came on the screen of Future TV in apparent violation of the ban.

“Hariri went mad,” Jaber recalls. “He was preparing himself to go to a party and he saw the piece and in a couple of minutes he was in the room shouting. He went nuts! He called up the general security guys and told them to go and close down the station.”

During three days of closure, Future TV lost $200,000 in advertising revenue. Jaber shrugs. “We broke the law.”

After the ban was in place, Jaber, a former reporter for the New York Times and the Times of London, didn’t shut down the news operation but sent his reporters out on human interest stories: features on beggars and fortunetellers around Beirut, analyses of city problems like traffic. The newscast handled political events, in compliance with the ban, by picking up foreign broadcasts from CNN or ITN.

In Jaber’s view, the result has been better quality. “I have really trained my journalists to look for more than just statements of the (Parliament) deputies and the empty words of ministers,” he said.

This year’s debate over the broadcast media carries a troubling echo of recent battles over the printed press, when the government threatened to jail reporters writing about political corruption and--in May, 1993--shut down three newspapers.

Under a subsequent compromise worked out with the press syndicate, the government can no longer close a newspaper before trial, and journalists are subject to imprisonment only if they attack the president or publish material deemed likely to incite sectarian conflict.

Daher complained that Lebanon’s press freedom is being infringed on by the fact that the government is discussing ownership controls and content restrictions. “Basically what I’m concerned about is the general atmosphere: Will there be freedom in this country, yes or no?” he said.

But veteran newsman Ghassan Tueni, editor of the independent daily An-Nahar and a former U.N. ambassador, said most of the complaining comes not from journalists but from politicians who have used the media to espouse a political agenda.

“One must not forget that the TV stations that are making so much noise were all born out of the war and they were all created illicitly by militias. . . . They were intelligent institutions of political propaganda, and many of them have thrived on practicing intellectual terrorism.”