Q&A – Walid Daouk

Walid Daouk, Lebanon’s minister of Information, was given a baptism of fire upon taking his post in June 2011 when his pet piece of draft legislation, The Lebanese Internet Regulation Act (LIRA), caused a storm of opposition and vitriolic denunciations, leading it to being put on the back burner. Executive met with the minister to discuss life after the LIRA and the promise and perils within Lebanon’s media sector.    What was your incentive to develop the LIRA legislation? I have not seen any legislation related to electronic media. What I had in mind was to protect the [news] websites. There are so many of them and they are of great importance. In the coming couple of years they will become more important than the newspapers. I said let’s not try to regulate, but fix it in some way. I had two ideas. The first was to put a label that