Precarity and Possibility Government Intervention and Informal Media Work in the Middle East

At first glance, Iran and Lebanon may appear to have very little in common when it comes to state intervention in the media economy. The Iranian government oversees nearly every aspect of media production, distribution, and exhibition, while the Lebanese state exercises relatively little oversight of media and offers no financial or infrastructural support to the country's robust creative industries. Given the divergent approaches to regulating media in Iran and Lebanon, we might expect each to yield vastly different media labor conditions. Yet in this article, I argue the opposite. I demonstrate how the two extremes foster informal labor practices that are remarkably similar. By bringing together these two unlikely case studies, I advocate for informality as a constitutive feature of Middle Eastern media. Such a claim expands the growing body of scholarship on media labor by accounting for the triangulation of informality, state regulation, and worker subjectivity.