By Libya Herald reporter.
Tunis, 3 May 2015:
The United States Institute for Peace . . .[restrict](USIP) released a report last Thursday entitled ‘‘Libyan Television and Its Influence on the Security Sector ‘’.
This report looks at three primary Libyan television channels to offer insights into the Libyan media’s role in shaping public perceptions and building political constituencies.
‘‘During and after Libya’s revolution, national media outlets became known and popular for their balanced reporting. The situation in the few years since has changed, however’’, the report says.
‘‘The security landscape in Libya today is a confusing array of institutional and non-institutional actors each asserting legitimacy. The country is on the brink of full-scale civil war. Its media has become both polarized and a key tool for many security actors’’, the report adds.
Orientations of Leading National Television Channels –
| TV Channel | GNC | Revolutionary brigades | Ansar Al Sharia | Haftar | Summary |
| Libya Al Ahrar | Critical | critical, considers them legal entities | critical, accuses it of role in assassination campaign, gives airtime | cautiously supportive, gives space for opposing voices | cautiously anti-Islamist, institutional |
| Al Nabaa | Supportive | supportive, considers them legal entities | prefers to focus instead on revolutionary brigades | regards Haftar as a renegade general | Mainstream Islamists |
| Libya Awalan | Strongly critical | strongly critical strongly critical, considers them illegal entities | strongly critical, considers them khawarij and terrorists | strongly supportive, regards Haftar as leader of Libyan Army | strongly anti-Islamist, |
‘’This research makes it clear that mainstream Libyan television channels played a substantial role in the early days of the ongoing conflict between the country’s revolutionary-Islamist and the institutionalist-conservative camps’’, the report added.
‘’The media, by taking partisan positions and using specific narratives to describe security-related events, have helped shape the public perceptions of security and political actors, such as the GNC, retired Libyan national army general Khalifa Haftar, Ansar Al Sharia, and independent brigades’’, the report explained.
‘’In particular, channels have helped build perceptions of legal legitimacy among Libya’s security actors, and correlations between trust in certain channels and perceptions of actors’ legal legitimacy are statistically significant. Despite continual and occasionally substantial changes in the media sector since the research was undertaken, these trends remain valid today’’.
‘’The partisan coverage of the conflict by mainstream Libyan television channels helps explain the dramatic polarization of public opinions over the clashes. These outlets are being transformed into propaganda tools, further boosting the civil strife in the country. This in turn is having an effect on media outlets generally, which are increasingly viewed as political and military arms and thus themselves become targets’’.
‘’Some security actors in Libya are justifying attacks on media outlets by blaming journalists’ bias and influence in the political struggle. Although the politicization of Libya’s television channels may help increase audience shares in the short term, it likely also undermines their credibility in the long term, which is a particular concern for the national public broadcaster Libya Al Wataniyah’’.
‘’The analysis enabled outlets to be positioned fairly accurately on the revolutionary-Islamist and institutionalist-conservative spectrums and to be ranked in terms of popularity and trust with interesting results. It was seen, for example, that some channels previously supported by the international community had less balanced positions than donors had perhaps initially assessed.’’
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