Al-Manar

Al-Manar (Arabic: المنار, romanized: al-Manār, lit. ''The Lighthouse'') is a Lebanese satellite television station owned and operated by the Lebanese Shia 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."