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THE GREAT ALHURRA DEBATE
DEC 7, 2005 - 10:43PM PDT
by Alvin Snyder

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee conceded that its recent call for a debate on Alhurra's effectiveness should have happened before America’s Arabic television channel went on the air. But the oversight committee is too late. The dispute rages daily in Washington and the Middle East, and battle lines have been drawn on two major issues. One is who is watching Alhurra, and the other is what they see there. Audience ratings are important because the message means nothing if no one is there to receive it, as noted by Norman Pattiz, who founded Alhurra and Radio Sawa, the United States government-owned Arabic radio station. How many people are watching the channel might seem like a point everyone could agree on, but there are no neutral zones in the great Alhurra debate. The numbers released by the station paint a much more optimistic picture of its viewership than do those calculated by outside sources. Recently, Worldcasting cited that Alhurra had a 14 percent viewership in Iraq, according to one independent survey. However, a survey released by the network showed 44 percent viewership in the country. Both surveys had about the same number of respondents in their samples for national representation of actual viewing, both did face-to-face interviews throughout Iraq, which is considered more reliable than telephone polling. Each defended to Worldcasting its sample model - the locations of respondents within Iraq - as the most representative of the entire country. Why the differing results? The survey showing 44 percent recorded the percentage of the adult population in the Iraq sample that said they viewed Alhurra in the past week, while the lower figure, 14 percent, represented viewers who watched the channel the day before. Previous day numbers are "the currency of the market, most of the agencies, media and advertisers are relying on such data," according to a spokesperson for IPSOS-STAT, a leading independent marketing company in the Middle East. I also know from my personal experience at CBS in New York, that the overnight ratings delivered to my desk first thing each morning were grabbed before coffee. A representative from the U.S. government’s International Broadcasting Bureau spoke to Worldcasting and granted that “weekly audiences are normally greater than daily audiences for all channels, since more people watch any given channel at least once over the course of a week than watch on any given day." The spokesperson defended the network's research by saying that "Weekly viewing and/or listening is the standard audience measure used for all" - the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and others - and that it is also the standard measure by other international broadcasters including “the BBC, Radio France International, Deutsche Welle, Radio Canada...We use the weekly measure to maintain consistency…” And this has yet to get to the heart of the controversy. According to one critic, Alhurra is known as “Al Jazeera lite in the Middle East." Salameh Nematt, Washington Bureau Chief of the international Arab daily Al-Hayat and the Lebanon-based Arab satellite…... FULL TEXT
 
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