The website of Alhurra, the Virginia-based Arabic language satellite broadcaster, acknowledges that the channel is funded by the U.S. government but says that the channel’s parent company, the Middle East Broadcasting Networks, Inc., “receives this funding from the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), an independent and autonomous federal agency. The BBG serves as a firewall to protect the professional independence and integrity of the broadcasters.” So why, then, were the broadcaster’s management team defending their station’s programming during a contentious and often unintentionally comedic congressional committee hearing yesterday?
It’s a rhetorical question. Alhurra was established in 2003 by Congress on direction of the Bush administration, and their funding is contingent on satisfying Congress that they’re behaving properly. Proper behavior includes not giving a platform to anyone on the State Department’s list of terrorist organizations, which includes Hamas, the governing political party in Palestine, and Hezbullah, one of the most powerful political parties in Lebanon and a key player in the continuing boycott of the Lebanese government, which means that the channel is legally proscribed from interviewing members of those organizations, which means that by design, there’s a bloody, gaping, glaring hole in the channel’s regional news coverage. Which is a problem because regional news coverage, albeit coverage favorable to the U.S., is the raison d’être of the operation, and persuading viewers to take seriously a news channel that won’t cover half the news is a real challenge in most parts of the world (the success of Fox News in the U.S. notwithstanding).
But that’s not the funny part. The funny part is that the channel’s management have no actual idea what they’re broadcasting because none of them speak Arabic. Funny-sad, as is the failure of presumably sentient members of Congress to grasp the notion that the US can’t showcase the virtues of free speech by censoring it.
Keep in mind, this is an actual reporter covering an actual congressional committee hearing.
Toward the end of a Congressional hearing on Wednesday on American efforts to win more popular support in the Arab world, Representative Gary L. Ackerman, Democrat of New York, got sidetracked.
Mr. Ackerman was in the middle of chastising representatives from the United States-financed Middle East television channel Al Hurra for broadcasting the views of leaders of the militant Islamist groups Hamas and Hezbollah. But when a Hurra executive mentioned in the station’s defense that it broadcasts uncut, live versions of President Bush’s speeches, Mr. Ackerman interrupted.
“You carry President Bush live?” he asked. Then, incredulously, “Hopefully we find this helpful to the mission?”
There was laughter throughout the committee room, but the exchange highlighted the central quandary surrounding American public diplomacy efforts.
In recent weeks both conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats have attacked Al Hurra for, in the words of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page last week, providing “friendly coverage of camera-ready extremists from Al Qaeda, Hamas and other terrorist groups.”
In particular, critics of the network, which was founded in 2003 as an Arabic-language, American-financed counter to Al Jazeera, are particularly annoyed that the network broadcast a 30-minute speech by the Hezbollah leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, in December.
Mr. Ackerman also complained during the hearing that the network gave extensive coverage to Iran’s conference in December on denying the Holocaust and, more recently, showed Ismail Haniya, the Palestinian prime minister (and Hamas leader), discussing the faltering Palestinian unity government.
“How does it happen that terrorists take over? Is there no supervision?” Mr. Ackerman asked.
That’s the point at which one of the executives, Joaquin Blaya, acknowledged that the senior management — the U.S. Board of Broadcast Governors and their staff — doesn’t include an Arabic speaker, so they never know about these problematic broadcasts until afterward. But, he said, they’re confident that their recently hired VP for news will make sure that regional newsmakers at odds with the US don’t find a soapbox on Alhurra.
Except former CNN producer Larry Register doesn’t speak Arabic either, and is under fire from both political parties in connection with Alhurra’s coverage of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust denial extravaganza.
The Times didn’t report the Alhurra manager’s response to Ackerman’s query about Bush, and the hearing transcript isn’t online yet. The story does indicate that at least some of the committee members realize that U.S. policy actually has an impact on the way people in the rest of the world view this country — even the rabidly conservative and hawkish Mike Pence is quoted acknowledging as much, although he’s fine with the policies — and that there’s a lipstick-on-the-carnivorous-pig problem here.
Most of the committee seem to suffer from a fundamental confusion about communication, though, and not just by way of the screamingly fucken obvious point that the people in charge of a station should speak the same language as their audience. If the U.S. wants to do propaganda, fine, sort of. If we want to do public diplomacy, fine. If we want to build an exemplary Middle East news outfit, that’s fine too, presuming we could find anyone who knew how and could speak Arabic (although my preference would be to keep that person here to build an exemplary U.S. news operation). But we can’t do all of those things through the same vehicle because they require different skill sets employed under different, if ideally overlapping in the latter two efforts, circumstances.
For a more rational perspective on Alhurra and its problems and potential than you’re likely to find in Congress or on the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, check out Abu Aardvark on the subject.
