On two occasions, within two days, two Lebanese media outlets almost lit up the fires of sectarianism. Last Saturday, a television channel claimed that a shooting had targeted a bus carrying passengers from the Southern Suburb, thus causing the death of one person. A newspaper then carried a fabricated story about a young man whom it said had his fingers severed by armed men in the Tarik al-Jdideh area, and had his pendant, which represented the sword of Imam Ali Bin Abi Taleb, stepped on. The television channel did not apologize for airing its false report that almost pushed the people to take to the streets to retaliate against the killers, while the newspaper settled for a futile clarification, which almost has nothing to do with the tense climate that was spread by its report and was the object of horrendous exploitation throughout the day before its falsehood was exposed. The two incidents were preceded and followed by blatant sectarian and political instigation to justify General Wissam al-Hassan's assassination. This is not the first time that the Lebanese media fuels the civil and political disputes, and nothing hints to the fact that it is about to distance itself from this role. It will likely even continue breaching its original mission - i.e. conveying the news, contributing to the shaping of public opinion and enhancing the values of citizenship - by lying even further and becoming more implicated in the projects of the political sides funding and controlling it. Hence, the Lebanese media operates based on a mixture between the avid search for a scoop, just like tabloids, and the seeking of mobilization, like the papers of totalitarian regimes. What is noticeable is that one of the institutions involved in both lies has been trying for some time to establish some sort of objectivity, but to no avail, which clearly points to the infiltration of its editing team and the implication of their directors in tasks of which they might not approve. However, neither their moderate competence nor their meager political culture could have allowed them to anticipate the traps. At this level, one should wonder about the identity of those journalists who earned the green light to trigger strife without any sense of responsibility, as well as about their cultural background, the schools and universities in which they got their education and the values which they were taught, rendering their reception of a phone call from an intelligence apparatus (whether an official or a partisan one) a source of pride. One should also wonder about the meaning of their belonging to a population and a country, about the content of the message they are conveying to their children and to Lebanon's youth, and the extent to which they would be willing to drench their hands in their compatriots' blood under the pretext of their pathological search for a scoop without any credibility or value, except for its provocation of people's instincts. At this level, one must say that the media outlets on both sides of civil division are not acquitted from the instigation and the mutual provocation, as the disregard of the checkpoints established in the Nehme area, the attacks carried out against those who stopped and the stabbing of the Shiites who were passing by constituted a resounding scandal. However, and out of accuracy, one should say that one side is more responsible than the other in spreading tastelessness and decadence. Indeed, the faltering rejectionist system in Syria, the obstructed project of its sponsors in the region and the fear over the upcoming major change, revealed the great vacuum endured by the followers of the aforementioned powers. It thus stripped them of the cover of resistance and exposed their reality as promoters of lies and falsifiers of events, with no other concern or purpose but to win in a political-media battle to reach power. This reached the point where any talk by the latter about Palestine became pitiful. This leads us back to square one, i.e. the organic link between superficial media outlets and a sick political life, and journalistic (therefore cultural) affiliation with bloody and sectarian leaderships, which constitutes the source of the problem in Lebanese socio-politics that are based on chauvinism and are completely opposed to all forms of public interest.
