In August 2011, when the popular uprising in Syria was at its peak, the left-leaning Lebanese journalist Khalid Saghiyah resigned in protest from his position as associate editor of the newspaper al-Akhbar, of which he was a founding member. A long-standing supporter of Hizbullah's resistance agenda (al-muqawama) and champion of the Arab left, he nonetheless broke with al-Akhbar over its negative coverage of the Syrian uprising (Dot-Pouillard 2012). Saghiyah stated that, although the cause of resistance was just, the time had come to support reform and democracy. As he put it, the revolutionary wave had shown that the Arab people's priority was ‘freedom, dignity and bread’ (Saghiyah 2011). Saghiyah found a new job as news manager at the centrist-right private TV station LBCI (Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation International) without relinquishing his political ideals. He used the channel as a platform to promote issues such as the conditions of workers, domestic violence, racism and human rights. In the fall of 2019, an aspiring revolutionary movement spread through Lebanon, and Saghiyah threw his experience behind it. He co-created the activist e-media platform Megaphone, which became a bellwether of the protests.

Khaled Saghiyah is a ‘change agent’ who puts journalism at the service of democratic aspirations. He is also one of the first Lebanese journalists we met. Saghiyah introduced us to a social activist strand of journalism, which resists the pull toward instrumentalisation. It defines itself through opposition with the journalists who speak for the country's politicians. Lebanon harbours a fascinating mix of such change agents and ‘trumpets’. Many high-profile journalists are closely aligned with specific political blocs and positions. In the words of one veteran news editor, all the main political parties have journalists who ‘speak in their name’ (L13, 30 January 2018). Opposed to them one finds an undercurrent of activists like Saghiyah who openly challenge the powers that be (Hanitzsch 2007: 373). They made their mark in the 2019–20 protests, as we will show in Chapter 8, but were active in the media long before that.