From Kandahar to bride: protesters' critique of the media's portrayal of Tripoli during Lebanon's 2019 October Uprising

During the Lebanese 2019 uprising, the country's second-largest city, Tripoli, became portrayed as the “bride of the revolution.” This portrayal was seen to break with the city's former stigma as a hotbed of extremism. However, as this article shows, local protesters were not unambiguously happy with this portrayal. Based on interviews with 30 protesters and fieldwork observations, the article seeks to understand the critical views of this narrative. It shows that there was a widespread perception among Tripoli protesters that the narrative of their city as the “bride of the revolution,” as presented by the media, represented a distorted image that romanticized, depoliticized, and de-contextualized the uprising. This narrative was believed to serve a political purpose. These findings provide two main contributions to scholarly debates concerning identity narratives and the role of media for social movements in societies like Lebanon, characterized by hybrid regimes and a complex media-politics nexus. First, it points to the complexity of breaking stigma and changing geography-based identities. Second, it shows how the political ownership of media fuels the understanding of media frames as being politically motivated, even when they seem sympathetic to protests.