Al Arabiya in the news

Speaking of al Arabiya, three quick notes.  First, as I mentioned in response to Asa'ad AbuKhalil earlier, al Arabiya has been pushing the story that there is a groundswell of support for Iyad Allawi to stay on as Prime Minister.  The story is rather thinly sourced, to put it politely, and rather suspect given al Arabiya's unabashedly partisan support for Allawi:  running a four part hagiography in the run up to the election along with an amazing number of Allawi campaign ads - which always raised the question of how he paid for them, and whether he was using covert American money or official Iraqi funds to do so. 

Also, Syria has unleashed an angry campaign against al Arabiya because of an interview that station ran with Kofi Annan.   In the interview, Annan forthrightly repeated that Syria must honor Security Council Resolution 1559 and withdraw from Lebanon.   In response, the Syrian media has been furiously denouncing the satellite station.  The case seems odd.  The Syrians are claiming that Annan's spokesman officially denied that Annan had said this;  al Arabiya says that they broadcast a video of Annan saying what he said, and the "harshness of his words are not our problem" (according to Abd al Rahman al Rashed).   The facts seem to be with al Arabiya here, although there may be more to the story that I've missed.  Raising this kind of stink is practically al Jazeera territory for al Arabiya, which generally tries to avoid annoying Arab regimes;  I guess they figure that Syria's is fair game right now. 

Finally, al Arabiya is trumpeting one of its on-line polls, which they claim got 166,000 respondents:  66% of whom believe that Syria's supporters will win the next Lebanese elections.   Sobering. 

I just want to make one last little snarky point here:  al Arabiya has pretty clearly become what al Hurra was supposed to be - a popular satellite station which pushes a pro-American line.  It actually gets noticed, people and states respond to it, and it makes a difference.  But since al Arabiya exists, what exactly is it that we need al Hurra for again?  Al Hurra, which nobody watches, nobody responds to, and doesn't make a difference, except for draining our public diplomacy budget?   

Comments

[praktike]

Wouldn't an anti-Syria al-Arabiya line be consistent with Saudi ownership? Don't the Saudis support the Sunni Arab majority there?

[the aardvark]

I think the Sunni factor is **way** overrated by certain writers. The Saudis and the Syrian regime have plenty of their own reasons for fighting politically, not least of which is the evolving Saudi-American relationship and the devolving Syrian-American relationship, along with current events in Lebanon. The whole "Sunni Arab majority" thing overstates the importance of confessionalism and conceals more important strategic dynamics.

So the answer to your first question is yes: anti-Syrian line is consistent with Saudi ownership. But the answer to your second question is that I doubt this has much of anything to do with it.

[Tareq]

The only thing that I like about Hurra is the horses promotion ad.

[praktike]

BTW, AA: check this out.

Al Hurra is on the march!

[the aardvark]

Well, I do think that Muslim immigrant populations in Europe are an important group to reach. If al Hurra is going to be useless in the Arab world it might as well be useless in Europe too.

[Anon]

Sorry to disagree with the Aardvark on one point, but here goes: there is no "evolving Saudi-American relationship" if by that you mean improving or growing more closely integrated. It was withering by the late 90s, the invasion of Iraq put the final nail in the coffin. The Saudis will remain polite of course (don't want to tick off the wild-eyed hillbilly who's set up camp next door after all), but they watch after their own interests first now thank you very much. The Fahd strategy of putting America before the kingdom's neighbors or even domestic challenges is gone. There's many examples one could point to, but one of the more powerful is the way in which ExxonMobil and other American firms have been frozen out of domestic gas investment while the Russians and Chinese have been invited in. Even more astonishing is that now the Indians, those who have for so long been treated so poorly as menial laborers, are now being actively invited to come in and invest in the kingdom (http://www.financialexpress.com/fe_full_story.php?content_id=79929).

[David F.]

Re Al Hurra broadcasting to Europe, they're not going to reach North African immigrants in France who only watch Arabic satellite channels. They have chosen to step away from secular French society and are hardly going to watch a channel they know to be backed by the US government. Those North Africans who do want 'free speech and open debate' can find it on TF1 or France 2 and don't even need a dish. And Al Jazeera is much more diverse in its range of opinions than the North African fundamentalist channels they used to watch.

The US government doesn't seem to have grasped that, unlike with eastern Europe during the Cold War, they are not broadcasting to a populace starved of information. As I'm sure the Aardvark has discussed at length, Al Hurra is competing against slick, populist, commercially-minded channels that are giving audiences what they want rather than what Uncle Sam thinks is good for them. It's ironic that the US should have such difficulty dealing with this outbreak of free-market capitalism.

[Michael]

Or maybe American capitalist media instincts are precisely to blame for the debacle. The old school of cold war broadcasting was based on a good, but rather subtle idea (considering whose head it needs to be gotten through): you don't compete with propaganda by stronger propaganda -- or now with populism by better populism. You create a niche. In keeping with the times, American-sponsored East-European services are currently being retooled from something resembling NPR or Radio France Culture to go head-to-head with the new talk media, against which they don't stand an icecube's chance in Basra. What can one do? Not much more than making it a squeakier wheel, I guess.