Beirut became a staging ground for coverage of the Middle East and North Africa during Lebanon’s civil war, sparked in 1975 by exploding sectarian tensions. Correspondents operated with relative freedom in the city’s open media environment and refined their craft in its militia-controlled neighborhoods, learning to navigate checkpoints and work with translators and fixers. The Commodore, a luxury hotel in Beirut’s Hamra district that opened in the 1940s, served as the unofficial headquarters of the foreign press corps. Militia leaders, diplomats, politicians, and spies frequented its lounges. Armed guards manned the entrance while correspondents filed dispatches from its lobby. Even when the city’s communications collapsed over the course of the war, the hotel’s landlines and telex machines remained operational. Reporters passing through met Coco, a parrot perched at the hotel bar who mimicked the sound of incoming shells. Terry Anderson, the Beirut bureau chief for the Associated Press, reported from the hotel until 1985, when he was taken hostage by a militia and held in captivity for nearly seven years.
Beirut remained vital for regional coverage during the Iraq War. Anthony Shadid, the late Beirut-based correspondent for the New York Times, filed coverage bolstered by his deep knowledge of local history, politics, and culture, in addition to his fluency in Arabic. Alongside Shadid were correspondents whose work depended on the unacknowledged labor—and, often, the trauma—of local journalists, news assistants, and translators. “Anthony had unique gifts as a writer and reporter, but what made him exceptional was his dedication to the story. When he wrote about Lebanon, or Egypt, or Iraq, the source of his authority was the years or decades he had spent studying these countries, living in them, and then listening to and sharing the voices of their people,” Kareem Fahim, a longtime reporter in the Middle East who worked with Shadid at the Times, said. “Many media organizations seem less and less interested in that kind of commitment.”
In the early 2000s, Gulf-based networks such as Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya expanded, with Doha and Dubai gradually becoming media centers. Even so, Beirut remained key for Middle East correspondence. By 2015, at the height of the US-led campaign against the Islamic State and the war in Syria, more than thirty full-time foreign correspondents were stationed there, current and former Lebanon-based journalists told me.
Lebanon’s cascading crises—a 2019 uprising against the political establishment, a port explosion, and a financial collapse triggered by years of government corruption and mismanagement—drove many reporters away. The Daily Star, an English-language newspaper that had long served as a conduit between the Lebanese press and international media, shuttered in 2021, a casualty of the economic free fall. In January, the Commodore closed its doors as the downturn battered Lebanon’s tourism and hospitality sector.