BEIRUT: Entering the printing house, one is overwhelmed by the roughness of the place. It is a little after midnight, and the rolls of film that carry the blood, sweat, and tears of editors and writers in the past few hours is safely tucked underneath a deliverer who bears a tired smile of someone who is well-versed in what is about to commence. The warehouse, where the printing house is located, is a worndown building in the outskirts of Beirut. Through the dim light, one can catch glimpses of colossal rolls of printing paper. 

The printing machine takes up an entire stretch of the printing house. It is said to be from the 1960s, according to “old man Assad,” as the workers call him, who has been working at the house for decades. 

Before the films, which have been prepared back at the office, can be fed into the rollers, it needs to be copied onto a rubber platter that is compatible with the near-neolithic mechanics of the printer. After this has been arranged, the templates of the newspapers are fed into the machine. One end takes care of the black and white pages of the newspaper, while the other end prints the colored covers. The engine starts, and so begins the mix and match war between the print machine and the workers. That is, the colors – all are a mix of yellow, blue, black, and red – must match up to form the faces of Anna Kournikova, Bank Ki-Moon, Libya’s Gadhafi, and other popular figures to grace the front pages. 

Eventually, the colors line up, if only after three or four trial runs. “Sometimes, we are here until one in the morning,” remarks one worker. Once printed, the machine counts the papers in stacks of 250, which is then manually assembled and placed atop a trolley for distribution. 

Many of the stacks are distributed to embassies and hotels. Some copies are sent south to UNIFIL, while another batch is sent to Damascus. Only a few years ago, the paper used to be distributed to Amman, Cairo, and Doha. “This was before the war,” now, such delivery is no longer economically plausible. 

Maurice Maalouf, professor of communication arts at the Lebanese American University, has been studying the trajectory of newspapers for the past few decades. “The monopoly of information [by newspapers] was challenged by the television 30 years ago,” he says. This is when, according to Maalouf, the print media entered a soul-searching phase. The initial solution was that television would deliver breaking news, while newspapers would continue to deliver in-depth, investigative, feature reporting. 

Much to the dismay of the printing press, this arrangement has not neatly matched up. Maalouf attributes this to lack of vision on part of the newspapers, but more so on the lack of management by the government. 

There have been government efforts to remedy this lack of regulation. The 1994 Audiovisual Media Law came close, and even passed through the Parliament. Yet when it came to enforcing the penalties and the fines, it lacked the internal support that it needed. “It is a typical Lebanese phenomenon,” comments Dabbous-Sensenig. She adds, “Those in power who make the laws, also break the laws.” 

Information Minister, Tarek Mitri agrees. When asked to identify main areas of reform, Mitri is quick to point out the lack of enforcement: “The laws are liberal, but the implementation of laws are also liberal.” 

Lebanon, explains Mitri, is in a particular bind. Its status as the only liberal democracy with press freedom in the Arab world means that extra caution must be placed on how the government regulates its media so as not to be seen as infringing upon this particular and fragile freedom. 

What happens if publications do not abide by the law? “Then you send a letter,” Mitri answers matter-of-factly. What happens if they still refuse to comply? Mitri chuckles, and says, “then you send another letter.” 

Mitri is quick to add, this time in a more serious note, that what Lebanese media needs is not strict laws – “they do not work, you see.” – but a code of ethics and a media observatory. He explains that most media are partisan and opinionated, their main task to advocate a specific line. To rectify this, an independent media observatory responsible for conducting research and providing statistics is required. “In Lebanon, the media is free but not independent. Hopefully it will change, inshallah,” Mitri trails off. 

Aside from this lack of regulation, what is often discussed, yet never challenged, is the absence of official data. Although in theory, the Information Ministry share responsibilities of keeping the newspaper industry in check, not much formal statement exists in the way of sales, distribution, and circulation rates. 

The dearth of information has never been righted. This is because the same political make up that deterred the telecommunication sector to develop has also boycotted any form of official survey (the first and the last time a census was held was back in 1932). In effect, all numbers that float around are merely declarations of publishers that do not hold much weight. Real sales figures remain hidden underneath a veneer of false claims. 

This absence of guideposts, combined with the state of journalism where thoughtful political analyses give way to sensationalist coverage, means that the Arab media is giving way to the comfort of mediocrity. “They are fatigued by the process alone,” harps Maalouf. Instead of learning from the mistakes of its western counterparts, print press in the Arab world is enjoying an uncanny calm before the perennial storm.