Lebanon’s famed As-Safir daily prints final issue

Its slogan was “the voice of the voiceless”, but after four decades the prestigious Lebanese daily As-Safir published its final issue Saturday amid a crisis in the country’s print media. A front-page editorial entitled “The nation without As-Safir” said the paper had “become exhausted... but we continue to see some light on the horizon of the profession.”

Founded one year before the start of Lebanon’s 1975-1990 civil war, As-Safir was known for its pan-Arab outlook and opposition to American policy in the Middle East. It gave a platform to some of the Arab world’s leading intellectual and artistic voices, including Palestinian national poet Mahmoud Darwish.

In March, founder and editor-in-chief Talal Salman announced that the paper, also known for its support for the Shiite militant group Hezbollah and the Syrian regime, would be closing. “We’ve run out of funds and we’re desperately looking for a partner to finance the paper,” he told AFP at the time.

Salman blamed Lebanon’s political stalemate and internal divisions exacerbated by the war in neighboring Syria. As print media around the world struggle to adapt to the digital age, Lebanese papers have also faced a slump in funding from rival regional powers. During the 1975-1990 Lebanese civil war, Libya’s Moamer Kadhafi, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Yasser Arafat were key financiers. As-Safir acted as the voice of Arab nationalists and defenders of the Palestinian cause while its rival An-Nahar stood for Lebanese pluralism. After the war, Saudi, Qatari and Iranian money took over, but today even Riyadh’s vast coffers are running dry.

Financial hardships have also hit An-Nahar. On Friday it told 40 employees not to turn up to work from January until its money situation was resolved, an employee told AFP.

The paper has not paid salaries for almost 15 months. The Lebanese journalists’ union said print media, the “national memory of Lebanon”, was facing a “major national crisis”. — AFP