Al Hurra's Audience

Norm Pattiz, the driving force behind al Hurra, has been saying in private the last few weeks that he had some great new audience research that was going to blow away the station's critics.    Yesterday, the Broadcasting Board of Governors released those numbers in a press release (you can find it here, but not yet on the BBG website).   Count me among the unblown. 

As Elizabeth Eaves over at the Gadflyer points out, there's a lot of odd spin given to the AC Nielson numbers:  "Let’s start with the fact that the seven countries surveyed included neither Iraq nor the Palestinian territories. I would have assumed these war zones to be on the front lines of the hearts-and-minds campaign, but apparently they don’t rate. It’s nice to know that Morocco may have the warm fuzzies for Alhurrah [sic], but I just don’t care as much.  The Alhurrah press release also does some funny things with numbers. It says that an “average” of 71 percent of Alhurrah viewers find the station’s news reliable. But it’s derived this figure by tallying the percentages from each survey country, then dividing by seven. By averaging country results, rather than population results, it fails to give an accurate picture of Arab opinion. Two tiny, wealthy, pro-American countries, Kuwait (with 2.3 million citizens) and the United Arab Emirates (with 2.5 million) are included in the survey. Their results are given the same weight as Egypt’s, which has 76.1 million citizens. Yemen, home to a poor and fairly radicalized population of 20 million, didn’t even make the survey."

Those are good points.  I would go even further by pointing to the numbers themselves, even in their unspun form.   

Here are the claimed "weekly viewing rates":  Egypt 12%, Jordan 29%, Kuwait 33%, Lebanon 20%, Morocco 22%, Saudi Arabia 24%, UAE 20%.  As I understand it, this simply means that respondents answered yes to the question "have you tuned in to Al Hurra in the last week?"    By that standard, these numbers are rather shockingly low.  In a survey I cited a few weeks ago, both al Jazeera and al Arabiya scored well over 80% on the same question in Saudi Arabia. 

Then the credibility numbers.  Sure, 75% of the 12% of Egyptians who have tuned in within a week find it credible - that's nice.  Selection bias, anyone?   Half of the 29% of Jordanians who tuned in within a week find it non-credible?  Over 40% of Lebanese who watch it find it non-credible?  That's pretty shocking given the built-in bias of the question, that those who tune in to a station presumably expect it to be credible - why else would they waste their time (unless you are a conservative "media analyst" looking to discredit the New York Times, I suppose). 

The bottom line on AC Nielson Al Hurra survey, then:  it's nice that the BBG is being a little more careful with their claims  than they have been in the past.  But even if you find these numbers credible (an open question), they can't be especially reassuring. 

Oh, and I'm sure this was just a typo, but I still found this quote from Norm Pattiz amusing.  From the press release:  ""Although we know that there are many hurtles still to overcome, we are attracting millions of viewers with what has proven to be reliable and credible news."  Yes, well good luck overcoming those "hurtles." 

Comments

[praktike]

When you put out blantantly dishonest pap like that press release, how can you expect people to trust your reporting?

[Mike]

Not to distract from the tenor of this post, which strikes me as largely correct, but Elizabeth Eaves' point regarding alHurra playing with the numbers by giving each of the 7 countries equal weight in the 71 percent average doesn't hold water.

Averaging by population, we'd find that 74.2 percent of regular alHurra viewers find it either "very" or "somewhat reliable." While Kuwait and the UAE are overrepresented in the alHurra presentation, so are Jordan and Lebanon and their impact is far more negative than the others.

Anyway, there's enough other funniness to go around.