When ‘The Free One’ becomes ‘The Failed One’
At first blush, there’s nothing especially wrong with the notion of the U.S. government trying to improve the nation’s image in the Middle East. After the attacks of 9/11, American officials knew we had some work to do in the region. After the fiasco in Iraq, those same officials surely noticed that the nation’s reputation had been tarnished, and was even more in need of rehabilitation.
It’s how the Bush administration went about making these improvements that’s the problem. State-sponsored news outlets are always problematic, but the administration’s Al-Hurra initiative is one of the more embarrassing propaganda efforts in recent memory.
Al-Hurra — “The Free One” in Arabic — is the centerpiece of a U.S. government campaign to spread democracy in the Middle East. Taxpayers have spent $350 million on the project. But more than four years after it began broadcasting, the station is widely regarded as a flop in the Arab world, where it has struggled to attract viewers and overcome skepticism about its mission. […]
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.
“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.”
The most common comparison is to Radio Free Europe during the Cold War. But RFE succeeded in part because its audience had limited options. The Arab World has satellite dishes — and little use for mediocre programming brought to them by the Bush administration.
This, apparently, never occurred to the U.S. officials responsible for this very expensive flop.
“Arabs sit in their homes in front of the television, and they surf like crazy,” said Hisham Melhem, a Washington-based anchor for al-Arabiya, a Saudi-owned satellite TV network. “You rarely find someone who says they watch al-Hurra. It may be number 10 on their dial. But definitely not first, not second, not third, not fourth.”
“They failed in finding their own niche, and they failed in presenting something different about America to the Arab world,” he added. “It’s a glitzy operation, a costly operation, with very little impact.” […]
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.”
But it’s not doing a good job. Indeed, Pro Publica’s Dafna Linzer reported that al-Hurra “has aired anti-American and anti-Israeli viewpoints, has showcased pro-Iranian policies and recently gave air time to a militant who called for the death of American soldiers in Iraq.”
“60 Minutes” had a report on the network last night,
And the campaign to win over hearts and minds continues….
I can only imagine how hard it was to find wingnuts who could speak Arabic.
LOL
If a satirist wanted to write about an incompetent administration creating a propaganda network, what better name than “The Big Hurrah”? Well, OK, if your story is in, say Iraq, you might tweek it a bit.
or could not speak Arabic
*Doh!*
I knew we forgot something!
“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.”
Sure, I get it. Bland and boring. If they’d only covered the story of how Bush bilked the American taxpayers a trillion bucks so ExxonMobil could go in and steal Iraq’a oil and make all that dough. What a knee-slapper that would have been! The entire Mideast would have been glued to al-Hurra.
Hey, if English was good enough for Moses and Jesus, it ought to be good enough for them…
Entirely consistent with the Bush Admin…
Competent at destruction…
Competent at enriching their corporate buddies…
Competent at cutting taxes for the rich…
Incompetent at everything else…
The interesting question here, I think, is the one asked at the end of the 60 minutes broadcast: Can a government run a credible news source? The CNN executive who ran al-Hurra concluded it can’t; there would always be a conflict between the requirements of journalism and of the government sponsor. This would likely to continue to be true even if the government wasn’t one being run by authoritarians like Cheney.
It also suggests the problem with the villager-run DC media. Time and time again I look at any of it, whether it’s CNN or ABC News or the NewsHour, and see that the thrust of the coverage is simply out in official la-la land. Take the question of “Is ‘the Surge’ working?” The actual aim of the Surge was never “winning” the conflict or political reconciliation; it was to (a) escalate the conflict and (b) buy time for Bush to get out of office and hand the mess to his successor. Yet you’d never hear this point of view from any of the official media. There was the whole charade of building up Bush’s sockpuppet Petraeus as some sort of objective wise man rather than just an administration tool, which all the outlets bought without question. Throughout the conflict we had the various bogeymen du jour (Saddam, Saddam’s sons, Zarqawi, Iran) who were obviously not as threatening or as central as they were being portrayed. Yet the official media went along with acting as if they were the sole bogeymen again and again.
The willingness of corporate media to toe an official administration line has, over time largely destroyed their credibility, at least to those with any real knowledge of the situation. The difference between the U.S. with its official/corporate propaganda and the arab world is that, ironically, the arabs have a more free journalistic universe, so they ignore the official propaganda station.
What flop? What incompetence? Seems to me that cash has been spread around to W’s bud’s, so: Mission Accomplished!
But [RFE] Radio Free Europe succeeded in part because its audience had limited options.
Come on, Steve, who’s feeding you such bollocks? No one, ever, listened to RFE. There was Radio Luxemburg, BBC of course, and a myriad of other funny language European stations that all us teenagers tuned into well after bedtime. Radio Free Europe, for those who had the misfortune to accidentally pick up the signal, was considered the pits and avoided like the plague.
— Just though I’d put that record straight.
“You go with the Arabs you have not with the Arabs you wish you had.”
“…al-Hurra has been plagued by mediocre programming,…”
“…It has also been embarrassed by journalistic blunders.”
“Many people just didn’t know how to do their job,”
“….mediocre programming brought to them by the Bush administration.”
“It is boring. Investigative pieces are rare,..”
“Jesus is risen today!”
Are you sure Al-Hurra isn’t really Arabic for “Fox News Channel”?
The only reason that this failed propaganda venture is finally getting bad press is because it aired some anti-Israeli speeches.
No one, ever, listened to RFE. There was Radio Luxemburg, BBC of course, and a myriad of other funny language European stations that all us teenagers tuned into well after bedtime. Radio Free Europe, for those who had the misfortune to accidentally pick up the signal, was considered the pits and avoided like the plague. — Goldilocks, @9
My mother listened to RFE (and/or to Voice of America, depending on whose signal wasn’t being blocked at the moment) and I listened with her, from the time I was a child. That’s because both of those had programming in Polish, which we could understand. BBC, OTOH, didn’t. So, we didn’t listen to it much until my English got good enough to do so (mid to late teens); my mother’s English was almost non-existent. Radio Luxembourg… I was the only one who listened to that (again, from mid to late teen years) and I didn’t listen to it for the news but for the “decadent bourgeois” music.
The thing, as my mother explained it, was to listen intelligently. RFE was propaganda — same as the state radio, but coming from a directly opposite philosophy — so the trick was to listen to both and make your own judgment what to believe. Somewhere in the middle was, usually, a good point.