Journalism Under Instrumentalised Political Parallelism: Media and Politics in Lebanon

What is the role of journalism in media systems where political parallelism co-exists with political clientelism? How do journalists navigate to carve out a professional space? Media systems that at the same time are polarized and instrumentalized have contradictory influences on journalistic agency. On the one hand, political parallelism, understood as stable links between political actors and the media and reporting that reflects political divisions, is associated with advocacy journalism. The journalists report from a partisan perspective and are often driven by their own points of view. On the other hand, political clientelism works against journalistic autonomy. In countries where oligarchs, industrialists, parties or the state instrumentalize the news media, journalists have little room to move beyond the will of their masters. The literature on political parallelism has analyzed these influences separately without reflecting on the tensions that emerge when they operate together. This article examines journalism under instrumentalized political parallelism and revisits the room for journalistic agency. We add a vertical analytical axis, capturing the conflict between elites and grassroots, to the established horizontal axis describing relations between political elites. Despite multiple constraints, we argue that journalists may increase their relative weight and leeway by connecting with vertical conflicts in regimes where political and economic oligarchs instrumentalize the media. Our argument builds on the case of Lebanon, a deeply divided society with a media scene that mirrors political and sectarian fault-lines. It is also a deficient democracy where entrenched sectarian elites monopolize the access to all top political positions. The data consist of media content analysis and face-to-face interviews with 30 professional journalists, collected between 2016 and 2019.