New TV calls for solidarity with presenter Eid
New TV is calling for “solidarity” with its embattled presenter Ghada Eid, whose show Al-Fasad (Arabic for corruption) is scheduled to air live on Friday evening.
The station released a statement on Thursday, promising that Eid would “appear to her viewers during her customary Friday night show,” and asked people “from throughout the country and from all political affiliations and persuasions” to stand in solidarity with Eid, who faces an arrest warrant for her alleged slander of a judge.
A New TV source told The Daily Star that a solidarity rally will likely take place at the station an hour before Eid takes the air, at 9 p.m. The source declined to predict whether a confrontation would take place, should the authorities attempt to arrest her.
Eid managed to elude police officers who arrived at the station, in Wata al-Msaitbeh, during her show last week, to enforce the warrant.
The station urged “all honorable judges to stand with [Eid] in order to recover the prestige of the judiciary and justice.” It said she was the victim of “vengeful, unfair measures that are part of a a series of such measures and methods of pressure, on the station and its employees, in order to limit their independence and prevent them from relaying people’s complaints to the authorities.”
Eid faces slander charges from two programs; one on the assassination of a Phalange official in Zahle, and the other involving accusations of vote-buying during the June parliamentary elections.
Separately, a Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP) official said the controversy should be treated “without seeing a police raid.”
Maan Hamieh, an SSNP media official, said Thursday that a solution should both safeguard the status of the judiciary, while dropping the arrest warrant and ensuring that Eid is responsive to the judicial process.