Al-Manar


Al-Manar is a Lebanese satellite television station owned and operated by the Islamist political party and paramilitary group Hezbollah, broadcasting from Beirut, Lebanon. The channel was launched on 4 June 1991 as a terrestrial channel and in 2000 as a satellite channel. It is a member of the Arab States Broadcasting Union. The station reaches around 50 million people.
The station is considered one of Hezbollah's most important global propaganda tools, with the Danish Institute for International Studies describing it as "the very centrepiece of the entire media apparatus".
It is banned in the United States, France, Spain, and Germany, and has run into some service and license problems outside Lebanon, making it unavailable in the Netherlands, Canada, and Australia.
According to the RAND Corporation in 2017, "Al-Manar has an annual budget of roughly $15 million, much of it supplied by wealthy expatriate Lebanese donors and various Iranian community organizations, and income from the sale of its shows."

History

Al-Manar first began terrestrial broadcasting from Beirut, Lebanon on 4 June 1991. The station was located in Haret Hreik in the southern suburbs of Beirut, close to Hezbollah's headquarters. Originally, the station had only a few employees, who had studied media in London during the mid-1980s. But almost a year later, Al-Manar was employing over 150 people.
Initially, Al Manar would broadcast five hours per day. Shortly before the 1992 election, it began broadcasting regular news bulletins in order to help Hezbollah attain more votes and spread its message to more people. In 1993, the station expanded its broadcasting to seven hours a day and extended its signal to the southern part of the Bekaa Valley. Ahead of the 1996 Lebanese parliamentary elections, additional antennas were erected in Northern Lebanon and throughout the Mount Lebanon range, so that the station could be viewed not only in Lebanon, but also in western Syria and northern Israel. Broadcasting was extended to 20 hours in 1998 but reduced to 18 hours in 2000 and 24 in 2001.
In 1996, the Lebanese government granted broadcasting licenses to five television stations, not including Al-Manar. Approximately 50 stations were forced to close at the time. Several stations appealed the government's decision, but only four of them were finally granted licenses, one of which was Al-Manar. On 18 September, the Lebanese Cabinet decided to grant Al-Manar a license after having been requested to do so by then Syrian president Hafez al-Assad. Al-Manar received the license in July 1997.
It started in this period to embed journalists with Hezbollah fighters, showing video of Israeli casualties, and including Hebrew so Israeli viewers could follow, with the aim of sowing fear among Israeli viewers.
The station's website was launched in 1999, at first hosting some recordings of Hassan Nasrallah speeches to a background of religious and nationalist music.
On 24/25 June 1999 the IAF launched two massive air raids across Lebanon. One of the targets was the al-Manar radio station's offices in a four-storey building in Baalbek which was completely demolished. The attacks also hit Beirut's power stations and bridges on the roads to the south. An estimated $52 million damage was caused. Eleven Lebanese were killed as well as two Israelis in Kiryat Shmona.

Satellite broadcasting

During the 1990s, the popularity of satellite broadcasting greatly increased in the Arab world and in Lebanon. The first Lebanese station to use this technology was Future Television, launching Future International SAT in 1994, while LBCI and the Lebanese government followed by launching LBCSAT and Tele Liban Satellite respectively. In order to compete with these emerging stations, and in order to find an international audience, Al-Manar announced its intention to launch a satellite channel on 9 March 2000. Muhammad Ra'd, a Hezbollah member of parliament and al-Manar's largest shareholder, submitted the request to the minister of transmission, which was approved in April 2000. Although the launch of the satellite station was originally planned for July, the date was moved up in order to coincide with the end of the Israeli occupation of South Lebanon on 25 May. This success led other television stations to follow in launching satellite stations, including Murr TV in November 2000, but it was shut down for "violating an election law prohibiting propaganda" – a fate which al-Manar did not meet, although its programming was also considered propaganda by many analysts. ArabSat, a leading communications satellite operator in the Middle East, headquartered in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, was at first wary about collaborating with al-Manar, because of the station's Shi'a agenda – the two companies agreed, however, that the programming would be adapted to the pan-Arab audience, leading to a slight difference between the local broadcast and the one via satellite. At first, only three hours of satellite programming were broadcast per day, but by December 2000, the station was broadcasting around the clock.
The timing of the satellite launch - covering the Israeli withdrawal and also the start of the Second Intifada - boosted its audience in the Arab world.
Al-Manar was soon carried by many satellite providers. However, starting with the removal of the station from TARBS World TV in Australia in 2003, many satellite television providers stopped featuring it. Until then the station was featured by the following providers at one time or another:
  • Intelsat, broadcasting to North America
  • New Skies Satellites NSS-803, Africa and parts of Europe
  • ArabSat, Middle East, North Africa, and parts of Europe, Saudi-owned
  • Hispasat, South America
  • AsiaSat, Asia
  • Nilesat, part-owned by the Egyptian government
  • Eutelsat, Europe, North Africa, and Middle East
  • SES Astra, Europe
According to the BBC on 26 July 2006, Al-Manar had three satellite signals:
  • ArabSat 2B at 30.5 degrees east
  • Badr 3 at 26 degrees east
  • NileSat 102 at 7 degrees west
By 2004, Al Manar was estimated to hold 10-15 million viewers daily worldwide.

2000s: Israeli attacks and global growth

The station's website team expanded in 2004, from four members to thirteen.
During the 2006 Lebanon War, the channel was continuously struck by missiles during Israeli air raids. The Israeli Air Force attacks on 13 July 2006 led to injury of three employees. The attack on Al-Manar's facilities shortly followed another strike against the Rafic Hariri International Airport in Beirut earlier that morning. Despite the attack, the station remained on air, broadcasting from undisclosed locations. The IDF bombed Al-Manar's Beirut complex again on 16 July causing fire in the complex and surrounding buildings. The station's signal disappeared briefly several times, then continued normal programming.
Human Rights Watch said the bombing of media outlets violates international law when they are not being used for military purposes. The incident was condemned by the International Federation of Journalists. The Israel Association of Journalists withdrew from the federation in response, claiming that Al-Manar employees "are not journalists, they are terrorists". The New York based Committee to Protect Journalists, also expressed alarm over the incident as "it does not appear based on a monitoring of its broadcasts today to be serving any discernible military function, according to CPJ's analysis."
The Israeli bombing increased the station's popularity:
With other channels turning to Al Manar for the latest line from Hizbullah, it could set the regional news agenda and bring viewers to its extensive coverage of the war. Indeed, purely by staying on air, Al Manar could claim a success. According to Israel's Market Research, the channel's popularity rankings in the Middle East leapt from 83rd to the 10th slot between July 15 and 28. This meant a substantial increase to the estimated 10 million people that tune in daily to its terrestrial and satellite channels in normal times.

In 2006, it began to broadcast online to complement its terrestrial and satellite output. By 2008, its website was hosting 100 new items a day, and reaching over 26,000 daily viewers, and as many as 55,000 according to its management. By the end of the 2000s, as well as TV broadcasts in Arabic, Hebrew, French and English, the station's website was available in Spanish as well.
As a result of removal from some satellite services in the 2000s, it signed new deals with smaller satellite providers, e.g. in April 2008 with Indosat, the operator of the Palapa C2 satellite owned by Telkom Indonesia, in which the Indonesian government is the majority shareholder. By 2009, al-Manar was watched by some 18 million people globally. By 2010, its annual budget was $10 million.

2013 Bahrain crisis

Iranian-backed Shia groups were involved in demonstrations starting in mid-2011 against Bahrain's ruling Sunni oligarchy, and al-Manar backed these demonstrations and condemned the government repression of them. In late December 2013, the Lebanese Communication Group that includes Al-Manar apologised for its partisan coverage of the events at a meeting of the Arab States Broadcasting Union. In response, Hezbollah forced the Director General of the station, Abdallah Qasir or Kassir, to resign. He went to Iran.

2020s

According to Orayb Aref Najjar, after the US assassination of Qasem Soleimani, leader of the Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps on January 3, 2020, "Al-Manar went on a daily attack on U.S. policy on Iran and the region, promising revenge."
Al-Manar translates its content into Spanish for circulation in Latin America.
On 25 October 2023, as the 2023 Gaza war spread to southern Lebanon, Al-Manar reported that its camera operator, Wissam Qassim, was killed in an Israeli airstrike on Hasbaiyya, southern Lebanon, alongside two employees of allied website Al Mayadeen, while they slept in chalets used by journalists. The station's studios in Dahiyeh, southern Beirut, were hit in Israeli airstrikes in early October 2024.