BEIRUT – Definitely closes its doors on Daily Star, Lebanon’s oldest English-language newspaper. The newspaper, owned by the former premier’s family Saad Hariri, in recent days it had also suspended the updating of the pages of the website.
The paper version of the newspaper closed in February 2020 at the start of the Lebanese financial crisis, but now the editors and other employees of the Daily Star have received an email informing them of the definitive closure for financial reasons. Thus continues the gradual extinction of traditional media in Beirut, for about a century considered the Arab capital with the freest and most plural press in the entire Middle East.
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In recent years, other columns of the Lebanese printed media had already disappeared from newsstands: as Safir, for decades a reference for the Lebanese and Arab left; al Hayat, a newspaper founded in Beirut in the 1990s and purchased by the Saudi prince Khaled ben Sultan; al Mustaqbal, a newspaper of the Hariri party of the same name. The Hariri group also lost its TV channel. And other periodicals in Arabic and French have also closed. For now they resist the daily newspaper al akhbar, close to the pro-Iranian Lebanese Hezbollah, the Francophone L’Orient-Le Jour and the historic newspaper an Nahar. The latter, however, has drastically reduced the foliation.
The Daily Star it was founded in 1952 by Kamel Mroue, then owner and editor-in-chief of the pan-Arab daily “Al Hayat”. The newspaper was not published for more than a decade during the civil war, from 1975 to 1990, returning to newsstands in 1996.
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by Francesca Caferri
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