Al-Manar
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Al-Manar

Al-Manar (Arabic: المنار, romanizedal-Manār, lit.''The Lighthouse'') is a Lebanese satellite television station owned and operated by the Islamist political party and paramilitary group Hezbollah, broadcasting from Beirut, Lebanon. The channel was launched on 4 June 1991 as a terrestrial channel and in 2000 as a satellite channel. It is a member of the Arab States Broadcasting Union. The station reaches around 50 million people.

The station is considered one of Hezbollah's most important global propaganda tools, with the Danish Institute for International Studies describing it as "the very centrepiece of the entire [Hezbollah] media apparatus".

It is banned in the United States, France, Spain, and Germany, and has run into some service and license problems outside Lebanon, making it unavailable in the Netherlands, Canada, and Australia.

According to the RAND Corporation in 2017, "Al-Manar has an annual budget of roughly $15 million, much of it supplied by wealthy expatriate Lebanese donors and various Iranian community organizations, and income from the sale of its shows."

Al-Manar first began terrestrial broadcasting from Beirut, Lebanon on 4 June 1991. The station was located in Haret Hreik in the southern suburbs of Beirut, close to Hezbollah's headquarters. Originally, the station had only a few employees, who had studied media in London during the mid-1980s. But almost a year later, Al-Manar was employing over 150 people.

Initially, Al Manar would broadcast five hours per day. Shortly before the 1992 election, it began broadcasting regular news bulletins in order to help Hezbollah attain more votes and spread its message to more people. In 1993, the station expanded its broadcasting to seven hours a day and extended its signal to the southern part of the Bekaa Valley. Ahead of the 1996 Lebanese parliamentary elections, additional antennas were erected in Northern Lebanon and throughout the Mount Lebanon range, so that the station could be viewed not only in Lebanon, but also in western Syria and northern Israel. Broadcasting was extended to 20 hours in 1998 but reduced to 18 hours in 2000 and 24 in 2001.

In 1996, the Lebanese government granted broadcasting licenses to five television stations, not including Al-Manar. Approximately 50 stations were forced to close at the time. Several stations appealed the government's decision, but only four of them were finally granted licenses, one of which was Al-Manar. On 18 September, the Lebanese Cabinet decided to grant Al-Manar a license after having been requested to do so by then Syrian president Hafez al-Assad. Al-Manar received the license in July 1997.

It started in this period to embed journalists with Hezbollah fighters, showing video of Israeli casualties, and including Hebrew so Israeli viewers could follow, with the aim of sowing fear among Israeli viewers.

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