U.S. Mid-East Propaganda Tool Shut Down

by Deb Cupples |  After more than four years and $350 million (U.S. tax dollars, that is), the Egyptian bureau of U.S. Government's Arabic-language TV network has been shut down.  Named "Al-Hurra" (The Free Ones in Arabic), the network is "the centerpiece of a U.S. government campaign to spread democracy in the Middle East," according to the Washington Post.

In short, the network with the name that sounds like a ad-slogan aimed at people suffering mental retardation was a propaganda tool -- which is one reason that the network was failing:

"Arab journalists and viewers say al-Hurra has a basic problem: It is boring. Investigative pieces are rare, and critics say the channel generally doesn't make waves.

"Salameh Nematt, a Jordanian journalist based in Washington, said that al-Hurra, like many of its competitors, has ignored controversial issues such as financial corruption involving Arab leaders and the use of torture by security forces.

"'Al-Hurra would have been the number one station in the Arab world had they done one-quarter of what they should have covered,' Nematt said. 'People say if it's an American station, nobody will watch it. That's crap. If it's an American station that does a good job, everybody will watch it.'"

Aside from the obvious problem of blatantly positive propaganda's tendency to bore people, Al-Hurra also suffered from management and hiring problems.  The Washington Post continues:

"Since its inception, al-Hurra has been plagued by mediocre programming, congressional interference and a succession of executives who either had little experience in television or could not speak Arabic, according to interviews with former staffers, other Arab journalists and viewers in the Middle East.

"It has also been embarrassed by journalistic blunders. One news anchor greeted the station's predominantly Muslim audience on Easter by declaring, "Jesus is risen today!"

After al-Hurra covered a December 2006 Holocaust-denial conference in Iran and aired, unedited, an hour-long speech by the leader of Hezbollah, Congress convened hearings and threatened to cut the station's budget."

In December 2006, incidentally, Congress was still controlled by Republicans.   Thus, it's not surprise that Congress had threatened to cut the budget when the station actually fulfilled a basic journalistic obligation to its viewers. 

Apparently, good help was hard to find, despite the hundreds of millions of dollars that went into the station since 2004.

"'Many people just didn't know how to do their job,' said Yasser Thabet, a former senior editor at al-Hurra. 'If some problem happened on the air, people would just joke with each other, saying, "Well, nobody watches us anyway." It was very self-defeating.'"

You can see the rest of WaPo's story here.

 

Comments

[Adam]

Ah, so that's why 60 minutes replayed their Al-Hurra critique last night. Got it.

Al-Hurra was a tremendous failure in every way: as an efficient government-funded enterprise, as a journalistic organ, as a commercial product, and as a porpoganda tool.

It would have been interesting to see the impact of an actual well-run Arabic language station, covering the same issues as Al-Jazeera, but with a pro-western (or at least anti-anti-western) bias. For instance, covering the Holocaust denier conference, but having commentators blasting the conference while split-screening archived video footage from the camps. Or broadcasting the Hezbollah leader's speech, but then following that up with extensive fact-checking critiques of the claims he made, and broadcasting responses from Lebanese Christians or Sunnis who have been displaced by Hezbollah military activity.

I'm not saying that such a station would be a good use of government funds, or that it would change hearts and minds in the mideast. I'm just saying that it would have been interesting to see what effect it would have had.

[Deb]

Adam,

I'm embarrassed to admit that I wasn't aware of Al-Hurra until I read that article about it during the wee hours today.

I suspect that it COULD have been successful in some ways, but that the money was wasted (high salaries for cronies and/or contractors -- the usual).

There's no excuse for those people to have failed to set up a top-notch outfit, esp. given that it didn't have to make a profit based on ad revenues.