This paper will present a comparative reading of two Beiruti newspapers to illustrate how a diverse set of actors competed and collaborated with each other to develop novel discursive paradigms in late Ottoman Beirut. The first major wave of mass-circulated newspapers in the Ottoman Empire appeared in Beirut in the 1870s. This paper analyzes two of the most prominent newspapers in Beirut, the well-known al-Jinān, published by Nahḍa luminary Buṭrus al-Bustānī, and the lesser-known al-Bashīr, a reactionary periodical edited by Louis Cheikho, a Catholic priest and philologist at the Université Saint-Joseph. It will compare how these two very different newspapers covered the major European political events of 1871: the Paris Commune, the Carlist Wars in Spain, and German unification under Bismarck. Although they ostensibly claim to provide an impartial news chronicle to their readers, their coverage of these events is deeply biased along ideological lines. This dissonance provides an insight into the narrative emplotment encoded in late nineteenth-century Arab/ic intellectual history and interrogates notions that the printed word heralded a “Liberal Age” in the Arab world. Instead, newspapers largely catered to existing communities and ontologies, as entrenched power-brokers simply co-opted the new technology to advance their own partisan agendas and alternative facts. Between the lines, the emergence of a distinct anticolonial sensibility can nevertheless be discerned. Both progressive and conservative newspapers strongly condemned Habsburg military incursions in the Balkans on the basis of a shared anti-European Ottoman solidarity that transcended the political ire, even as they promoted economic liberalization in Beirut as a strategic means of local resistance against the Ottoman sultan. This paper argues that the disruptive new technology of mass journalism had a powerful impact on the city's media environment, both challenging and reinforcing existing power hierarchies.