The military takeover of Hezbollah is still making headlines in the Arab world as competition grows fiercer between Arab channels.
The major channels competing in the region are the Saudi-owned Al Arabiya, Qatar-based Al Jazeera, U.S.-backed Al Hurra, and British broadcaster BBC Arabic. Added to those is Lebanon's Future Television which was out of contention until today after Hezbollah militias set the building on fire and closed the station by force.
Hezbollah—which usually commands the respect of Arab media—has won the military battle on the ground, but lost the battle in the satellite world. Popular broadcaster Al Arabiya reported events in Lebanon under the title "The Hezbollah coup."
Al Jazeera, Al Arabiya's arch rival, started slow and unsure and only broadcast for a couple of hours a day, unlike Al Arabiya which was virtually the only channel to broadcast breaking news and special interviews around the clock. The BBC has not managed since its inception to attract any sizable audience and has had no real impact in the current crisis.
The real surprise was Al Hurra, which despite changing its Hezbollah-biased administration last year, did not cover the situation in Beirut. Its editorial staff attributed the problem to the fact that the current news director, Daniel Naasif, is biased towards the Free Patriotic Movement, an opposition Christian party allied to Hezbollah.
This could have played a major role in giving scant coverage to the latest events and demonstrates a major drawback in the channel. While most news channels offered coverage of the Lebanese crisis from morning to night, Al Hurra maintained its daily schedule and only mentioned Lebanon in the regular newscasts and news headlines.
The 200 million Arabs glued to the screen waiting for news from Lebanon were divided into two camps—those who watched Al Arabiya and those who watched Al Jazeera. The rest of the channels had very little audience.
