Media vs. society in Lebanon: Schizophrenia in an age of globalisation

Dima Dabbous-Sensenig

In the regional conference on Gender and Communication Policy held in Beirut in November 1999, thirty speakers from eight Middle Eastern countries reported on the media situation in Cyprus, Egypt, Iran, Lebanon, Morocco, Tunisia, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates, with an emphasis on gender portrayal and existing gender-sensitive communication policies. Participants voiced similar concerns about women and the media: on the one hand women are objectified in front of the camera and underrepresented behind it, and on the other hand the situation is made worse by the general lack of gender-sensitive communication policies capable of changing the situation. The regional conference resulted in the Beirut Declaration, which stressed the need to implement various recommendations concerning training, advocacy, and networking, in order to stimulate ‘the formulation of communication strategies using a gender approach’ and ‘to achieve gender equity in human rights, freedom of choice, greater access to mass media and full participation in the process of decision-making’.


The following article offers, in addition to a summary of my report on Lebanon presented at the above-mentioned conference, an evaluation of the major recommendations of the Beirut Declaration. I discuss the strengths and weaknesses of those recommendations, especially regarding their applicability within a Middle Eastern context. I also offer some suggestions for change and point to areas that require further investigation, with the modest aim of contributing to what I truly consider an urgent step towards developing a gender-sensitive communication policy in the area.


It should be noted, from the outset, that Lebanon is both representative and non-representative of other Arab countries in the region. One is naturally tempted, when looking at the media landscape in Lebanon, to equate the relatively high number of different, private media outlets with pluralism and freedom of expression, especially since Lebanon is the only Arab country that allows the existence of private/commercial broadcast stations alongside the state-controlled broadcast media. Being comprised of different religious communities each vying for survival with its distinct sets of values and beliefs, and not one of them large enough to impose itself as a ruling majority, the Lebanese political system had to accommodate those different politico-religious groups by giving each its share of power and control. As a result, the Lebanese political system is pluralistic and relatively democratic, especially when compared to the mostly monolithic, authoritarian Arab regimes existing in the area.


However, a closer examination of the patterns of media ownership and control in Lebanon reveals a different picture. While it is true that we have a relatively high number of private broadcast media, these are exclusively owned by government officials, their relatives, and business partners with whom they are involved in other ventures (bankers, contractors, industrialists, lawyers, etc.). Moreover, the dividing of the ‘media cake’ in Lebanon reflects power divisions along confessional lines in the country: each of the licensed broadcast media serves as the exclusive mouthpiece for one of the powerful factions to which the major shareholder belongs and is free to disseminate views particular to that faction. As a result, equating the existence of different private broadcast media with pluralism and freedom of expression is a misconception. Though freedom of expression and the media is consecrated for all in the Lebanese Constitution, only those media owned by powerful confessional/economic groups were actually licensed and guaranteed freedom of speech. Weak political, economic, or confessional groups were naturally denied a license and therefore excluded from public debate.


Perhaps the most ‘unique’ feature of the Lebanese terrestrial and satellite broadcasting, however, concerns the portrayal of women in the media. Characterised - unlike other Arab countries - by a strong degree of openness to Western cultural products, the Lebanese terrestrial media, especially television stations, supply a heavy diet of practically uncensored Western programming. Remaining time slots are filled with either Arab soaps or Lebanese productions that literally emulate the values and themes of popular Mexican telenovelas. Lebanese viewers are thus regularly and ‘legally’ exposed to a wide range of programming where women on the screen range from the completely liberated - sexually and otherwise - model of Western womanhood, to the ultra-conservative, submissive, dependent, and chaste ideal of the Arab woman.


Diametrically opposed to this unique open character of Lebanon as far as its media are concerned , is its character as a traditional conservative Arab country, as its civil and criminal laws strongly attest. Lebanon is, in that respect, similar to other Arab countries in its social rejection and legal punishment of promiscuous behaviour such as pre-marital and extra-marital sex, especially for women (e.g. state-sanctified crimes of honour, where men killing their wives, daughters or sisters on mere suspicion of having unlawful sex are later acquitted, is a case in point). As a result, Lebanese viewers, especially youths, are confronted with a schizophrenic situation where easily available media products - local or imported - are entirely out of sync with the society they live in and the laws that govern that society. On the one hand Lebanese viewers are heavily exposed to the ‘normality’ of sexual promiscuity on the screen, and on the other hand, they are faced with civil laws, to say nothing of traditions, that punish discriminately (for the same ‘sex crime’ men serve an unjustifiably reduced sentence) the same behaviour in real life. Thus, not only is there a pressing need to come up with and implement gender-sensitive communication policies to improve the portrayal of women in the Lebanese media, serious action has also to be taken concurrently to address and stop the blatant sexism in Lebanon’s social policies and laws.


The Beirut Declaration: an evaluation

Having briefly delineated the situation in Lebanon, I come back to the Beirut Declaration, in an attempt to evaluate it as an effective ‘tool kit’ for the formulation of communication strategies using a gender approach in the Middle East . As already mentioned, Lebanon represents a special case compared to other regional participants (Tunisia, Iran and Turkey are other distinct cases). It shares major common characteristics with most other participant countries (traditional conservative values) while at the same diverging significantly in other respects (political and media systems).


The Beirut Declaration was able to point out serious problems concerning women and the media shared by all participant countries - marking the first important step towards solving those problems. For instance, all the participating countries, as the conference made clear, suffer from a serious lack of gender-sensitive communication policies: with the exceptions mentioned above, Middle-Eastern countries, unlike many other developing countries, especially in Latin America, do not have any ‘women’s ministries’ or ‘women’s departments’ to start with (Hermano, 2000 :22). As for those countries where women do have access to jobs in the media, there is a great discrepancy between the number of women who work in the field and those who occupy decision-making positions.


The Lebanese experience is the most flagrant example of this discrepancy: with around 85% of students in journalism and communication being women - a percentage even higher than that of students of the same field in many European countries (Gallagher, 1994:115). The number of female news journalists averages the same and sometimes reaches up to 100% in some television stations, although top ranking positions continue to be monopolised by men (roughly 18% of those positions are occupied by women). As Mrs. May Kahhale, media advisor to President Hraoui summed it up: ‘The reality shows a presence rather than a role of women in the media’ (quoted in Lorfing, 1997: 30, emphasis mine).


Alongside their common problems and concerns requiring similar strategies for solutions, participants’ reports also made clear that the Middle Eastern countries in question are not only marked by cultural/linguistic differences, but also have widely differing political systems. These systems occupy a broad spectrum, with totalitarianism at one end and (relative) democracy at the other. This brings to the fore the question of the different socio-economic and political contexts of the participating countries and the role this observation plays in finding a workable ‘common set of recommendations’, as agreed in the Beirut Declaration. The specificity of the Lebanese case already discussed becomes especially significant in this respect. It draws attention to the need to address the political, cultural, and economic specificities of each of the countries involved. Though these differences are duly mentioned in the Declaration, they are simply glossed over, not identified or listed. Taking only the Arab countries involved , it is indeed difficult to think of them as a homogeneous entity. Despite their common language, they present quite a wide array of economic, political, social, and cultural configurations.


This lack of contextualisation - of addressing the specificity of countries grouped under one region but offering disparate cultural and political characteristics is, in my opinion, what makes the Declaration a less user-friendly tool kit for those who will need it in the future to address gender issues and the media in their own countries. By way of example, some of the recommendations of the Beirut Declaration, such as pressing media organisations to ‘introduce equal opportunities policies’ in recruitment may be simply inapplicable in those countries where most if not all of the media are still owned or controlled by conservative and authoritarian governments who professedly exclude women from public life, mostly for religious reasons.


Careful understanding and analysis of the media patterns of ownership and control and their sources of revenue in each of the participant countries is thus vital in order to affect the necessary changes needed as far as gender-sensitive communication policies are concerned, i.e. adding this ‘tool’ to the Beirut ‘kit’ is one way to turn it into a more user-friendly, comprehensive manual that addresses the particular needs of regional civil society groups and NGOs.


Another important ‘tool’ that these organisations would also look for in the ‘box’ is one that would help them deal with the strongly religious mooring of most Middle Eastern societies. Keeping in mind, once again, the variations in this respect between the individual countries, the impact of religion (predominantly though not exclusively Islam in this case) is mostly felt where gender roles are concerned. Strong patriarchal religious convictions continue to dominate, mostly excluding women from the public sphere and relegating them to the home.


In an attempt to correct the gender imbalance in the Middle East, one is tempted here to adopt either one of the following two strategies: either to underestimate or forget outright the role of religion, or to blame religion for all abuses against women and ultimately reject it altogether. In either case, the strategy is ill-adapted to the social realities of the Middle East and may simply backfire. Several Middle-Eastern feminists and human rights groups working for social change precisely derive their motivation and legitimacy from their religious (mostly Muslim) convictions. Denying them this right may simply alienate them and jeopardise their work, while cutting them off from their popular base.


Quite expectedly, the main threat to these indigenous groups comes mainly from conservative religious Arab male leaders. These politico-religious élites who need to legitimise their rule and conception of gender roles by ascribing them to a religious text (the Kor’an) and divine law (Shari’a), attempt to discredit the ‘revolutionary’ effort of Muslim feminists by claiming that their feminism is not home-grown, that it is a Western implant doomed to fail due to its disregard for the cultural/religious heritage of the region. As Mernissi advises, in answer to these accusations, one has only to go back to Islamic history to look for and document women’s contributions in the first decades of Islam when active models of femininity did abound (Mernissi: 1993), and to demonstrate that the present degradation of women in Muslim countries is actually a violation of the very principles and laws of the Qur’an:


Progressive persons of both sexes in the Muslim world know that the only weapon they can use to fight for human rights in general, and women’s rights in particular, in those countries where religion is not separate from the state, is to base political claims on religious history (Mernissi; 1996:92, emphasis mine).


Challenging the positions of Muslim conservatives hostile to rights (especially for women), however, is probably the hardest, if not most dangerous task facing feminists in their endeavour to reinterpret religion and history in the Arab/Muslim world in order to affect social change.

Need for networking

Having discussed the main weaknesses, or more exactly omissions (i.e. the political and religious contexts) of the Beirut Declaration, I deal next with what I consider to be its key recommendation and main strength, i.e. the need for networking. It is actually through effective networking that all other recommendations may become possible, despite the problems discussed above. Considering the imbalance of power between the government and the governed in Middle Eastern political systems, the main problem facing local feminist organisations pressing their (mostly authoritarian) governments for change is the weakness, if not absence, of civil society. Under those circumstances, they are left with very little room for manoeuvring, and may even face physical or legal persecution in their challenge of the status quo.


Networking in this case may be the most appropriate means of strengthening them through linkage with other organisations at local, regional, and international levels. First, by networking at a local level, these various groups can start by better advertising their presence to increase their popular base and to mount concerted action with other national NGOs against their government’s abuses. Second, NGOs working in developing countries whose geographical proximity gives them a set of shared problems unique to that part of the world can capitalise on those similarities to achieve their goals. In the case of the Muslim Middle Eastern countries, for instance, there is a pressing ‘common’ goal to defend women’s rights while reconciling Islamic law with international human rights. This is a task in which international Western NGOs, for instance, are mostly unable to help. By contrast, an active exchange and dissemination of ideas and advice, feminist historical studies, translations , and stories of success or failure between regional organisations may be the most appropriate tool to achieve their goal.


Finally, the role of international, mainly Western organisations should not to be neglected. Where local and regional alliances remain ineffective when dealing with government callousness, global connections need to be established as a last resort. Here the expertise, legal advice and organisational skills of Western activist groups may prove invaluable.

Conclusion

By focusing on the media situation in eight different Middle Eastern countries, the Beirut conference, drew attention to the following: on the one hand, not only do these countries differ in culture and language, but also in the degree of democratisation of their system of government (including communication). Using the case of Lebanon and its unique situation as a relatively democratic Arab country with pluralistic liberal media and conservative civil laws, I called for the need to account for those differences when formulating and implementing common gender-sensitive communication policies. I also argued that, since most of the Middle East is still mired in a predominant culture of religious patriarchy and conservatism, any challenge to the hegemonic politico-religious patriarchal elite can be successful only if it capitalises on and incorporates religion in the feminist struggle and if it searches for an indigenous, Muslim- and international- based concept of human rights.


Finally, it must be reiterated that the Beirut Declaration was a much needed initial effort to organise action and affect change in gender portrayal in an area that suffers from a serious lack of gender-sensitive communication policy. By strongly recommending networking strategies, the Declaration has effectively made the various Middle Eastern organisations aware of how to overcome their cultural, political, and economic disparities: i.e. by using what Annabelle Sreberny refers to as ‘difference-in-solidarity… the women’s movement’s mode of operation’ (Sreberny, 1998:220, emphasis mine).

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References
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Hakim, Dina (2000). Family Relations and Physical Encounters in Arab Soap Operas. In Al-Raida (The Pioneer), Vol. XVII, No. 88, Winter 2000.

Hermano, Teresita (2000). In Search of Gender and Communication Policy. In: Al-Raida (The Pioneer), Vol. XVII, No. 88, Winter 2000.

Lorfing, Irene (1997). Women, Media, and Sustainable Development. Beirut, Institute for Women’s Studies in the Arab World, Lebanese American University.

Mayer, Ann Elizabeth (1997). Islam and Human Rights: Tradition and Politics. London, Westview Press.

Mernissi, Fatima (1996). Women’s Rebellion and Islamic Memory. London: Zed Books.

Mernissi, Fatima (1993). Le Harem Politique: Le Prophete et les Femmes. Damascus, Al-Hasad.

Parenti, Michael (1993). Inventing Reality: The Politics of the News Media. New York, St Martin Press.

Sreberny, Annabelle (1998). Feminist Internationalism: Imagining and Building Global Civil Society. In: Thussu, D.K. ed., Electronic Empires: Global Media and Local Resistance. London, Arnold.

Dima Dabbous-Sensenig, BA, MA (1965): lecturer for communications, gender and cultural studies at the Lebanese American University (LAU), Beirut; Ph.D. candidate at Sheffield Hallam University, UK, currently completing a thesis on Lebanese broadcast legislation; staff member at GenderLink Diversity Centre, Salzburg/Beirut, participation in EU project (VI Community Action Programme on Equal Opportunities for Women and Men); recent scholarly publications on women in the media and gendered cinema studies.