Al Hurra... Washington's Error

A different kind of criticism of Al Hurra in the Arab News.   Tareq al Homayed complains that he - and, presumably, other Arabs like him - actually looked forward to a high quality American-style television station.  But with Al Hurra, they didn't get one.   

He's disappointed:  "We had expected Washington’s Arabic channel to come with American media values and not compete with Al-Jazeera channel, creating a situation of extremists answering back to extremists.   We had expected to see news broadcasts that were not opinionated nor censored, programs that formed an awareness, programs that explained the American political system to the Arab world and the policies of balances in Washington. ."

He concludes that Al Hurra has failed to deliver on its own promise:  "Anyone who knows the American media or has worked in Washington will be shocked watching this satellite channel broadcasting at its present standard."

The problem with Al Hurra is not that it's American, he argues. It's that it isn't:  The reason?  "I can say that the decision to hand it over to an Arabic media team for supervision is a mistake similar to Paul Bremer’s release of the Iraqi Army after the fall of Saddam’s regime."

He goes on:  "We have not found the depth of American media or its ocean of information in the new channel.   Instead, we saw a channel with an approach more like that of the Lebanese civil war and maybe with the same faces...Al-Hurra’s problem .. is that it is entrusted to those who want to settle matters in the Arab world or steer them in one direction."   

This is a particular complaint that I've heard a lot - the Lebanese, and especially allegedly Lebanese Christian - quality and tone of the programming.  The editor in chief of a major Arab newspaper told me something very similar over the phone the other day - that Al Hurra was poorly served by the Arabs running it.  At the time, I thought he was just settling scores with certain people he doesn't like, but since then I've heard several other Arab journalists speculate that Washington probably doesn't even realize what the people running al Hurra are doing, or why it matters. 

Right or wrong - and I don't feel like I'm in a position to really judge at this point -  this is a thread running through current Arab discussions of Al Hurra, and therefore worth thinking about.

Comments

[Anna in Cairo]

Hi Abu Aardvark,

I posted on this at Matthew Yglesias' site -- he mentioned you had brought this issue up. as I said there, this is not new really; if you look at the Arabs who work in translation, Arabic teaching, and broadcasting for the USG in Washington you'll find they are mostly Lebanese because, well, because Lebanese Arab Americans are most likely to be the highly educated ARabic speakers that live in DC. However it is true that US Embassies in the region seem to have a policy, long-standing, of hiring minorities in the ARab countries -- Christians in Syria and Lebanon; Coptic Christians in Egypt; Druze in Syria; etc. I dont' know if this is a sort of liberal US sort of affirmative action in solidarity with minorities, or if it's a more Machiavellian divide and rule thing, but it is long standing. I think it colors the reporting that comes out of the embassies and that it is not necessarily all that smart because of this.