Playing the Blame Game: Discursive Constructions of Accountability in Lebanese News Coverage of the Beirut Port Explosion

In the context of large crises, especially in politically polarized and fragile states, news media serve a critical role in constructing narratives that further shape public discourses. This study explores the discursive construction of blame in Lebanese digital news coverage of the Beirut Port Explosion from August 2020 to February 2021. This disaster devastated the capital and triggered public outrage due to Lebanon's pre-existing economic collapse and institutional paralysis. With formal mechanisms of justice dysfunctional, news media became a space to negotiate the production and attribution of blame. This study explores how two ideologically diverse Lebanese outlets, The Daily Star and L'Orient Le Jour, constructed blame in the aftermath of the catastrophe. Using Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA), 40 digital articles were investigated through visual and textual tools over a six-month period. Integrating discursive strategies provided a framework to uncover how actors are represented, narratives constructed, and moral responsibility assigned or deflected. The findings reveal two dominant discourses. The first discourse focuses on systemic blame, portraying the Lebanese state as a collective perpetrator. The discourse portrays the state as morally and structurally culpable in years of corruption, negligence, and political dysfunction that led to the explosion. This was reflected through emotionally charged representations of victims, protestors, and stalled legal processes. The second discourse is one of blame denial and deflection, emerging from elite discourses, where political actors avoided accountability through strategic procedural language, narrative ambiguity, and mention of sovereignty. These attempts included redirecting blame to foreign actors and painting accusations as politicized and baseless. This study enhances the literature on news media and crisis discourses by examining how blame is negotiated when institutional accountability is lacking. It demonstrates insights into how journalism in fragile environments performs as a moral function, mediating public outrage and shaping narratives of justice, contributing to larger discussions on the performance of accountability in the Global South.