Executive summary: Lebanon is facing today one of the deepest and most intense crises of the entire Middle East region. It is a mix of social, political, and economic issues, which have not been properly addressed by the political system in the past years that is currently showing its consequences. One of the reasons behind the failure of the political class to find the right answers to the numerous problems is the high degree of sectarianism that permeates not only the political sphere of the country but also other aspects of the social and economic landscape of Lebanon. In this paper, it will be investigated whether and how the media sector changes its narration of the events according to its political affiliation. More specifically, it will be conducted a study on the newspaper sector by taking extracts from three different news agencies which are related to the three main different religious communities in Lebanon: Sunni, Shia, and Christian. The analysis intends to understand whether or not they openly express their affiliation and how this affects different perceptions of the same event. The facts taken into consideration in this paper will be the ones related to the 14th of October 2021 protests, when 7 people were killed in a gunfight and that made many observers call it a “new Lebanese Civil War”.
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Alessandro RICCI is Associated Junior Researcher at MEPEI. He holds a MA in Sciences of Languages, History, and Cultures of Mediterranean and Islamic Countries at the University of Naples “l’Orientale”. His primary academic interests are Middle East and Mediterranean politics, political Islam, and international relations. Currently, he is enrolled in a Second Level Master’s Degree in Geopolitics and Global Security at the “Sapienza” University of Rome.
