Wow! The United States created an Arabic language satellite television station - who knew? Did you know that its offices are located in Virginia? That it has state of the art studios? Fascinating!
Der Spiegel, as translated in the New York Times, runs a breathless piece that proceeds as if nothing has ever been written about al-Hurra before. My first response to it was quite snarky, as in the opening paragraph above. But I may have been too hasty. Buried within the fluff there are actually some nicely revealing points.
For example, the article finally offer us some metrics for evaluating the success of the station in its core mission: "Al-Hurra is doing very well -- the station is clearly being pampered by its financial backers." Because nothing spells success quite like this: "waiting rooms are filled with designer furniture, there are new flat-screen monitors on the walls, the computers are all state-of-the-art -- and all of this without advertising." And, as the 9/11 Commission Report pointed out, there are few things more urgent for America today than designer furniture and new flat-screen monitors.
Because other than that, the story's got nothing on that minor question of "success": "How successful is the most expensive PR campaign since the end of the Cold War? "We do our part," claims Harb." With 20 million viewers, he claims! (By comparison, al-Jazeera generally claims 35 million; almost all market surveys, including those by the BBG, show al-Jazeera with a massive advantage, with which even Norm Pattiz and Muwafiq Harb now say that they can't hope to compete; so 20 million hardly adds up. My guess is that "20 million" was just a nice, big, impressive sounding number that he pulled out of the air.)
It also has an interesting bit on the question of whether al-Hurra is American propaganda or a real news organization. Early in the article, we get this: "A propaganda station? Nonsense, [Harb] says indignantly. "We are funded by the government, but I have never received any instructions, not from anyone." But then later in the story, we get this:
"Even the station's confident director [Muwafic Harb] admits that Al-Hurra's underlying tone is consistently friendly to the Bush administration. For example, its 50 staff members in Iraq have been instructed to be on the lookout for signs of improvement. "If the power comes back on in a part of the city, we see this as being more newsworthy than reporting that the power is out someplace else," says one employee."
Nice to hear Harb admit that al-Hurra really is Fox News in Arabic, even if nobody actually "told" him to do that.
In the last paragraph, conservative al-Hayat columnist and frequent al-Hurra guest Salameh Nematt is quoted saying something I've heard him say in private but not seen him quoted in public on previously:
"People have no confidence in Al-Hurra," says Salameh Nematt, who works for Arab newspaper Al-Hayat and is a regular on a round table talk show at Al-Hurra. Nematt recommends aggressive reporting on the Middle East's dictatorships: "As soon as the first correspondents are thrown out of Egypt and Saudi Arabia," he says, "people will begin to trust Al-Hurra."
I agree with Nematt on this point, and it's one that I've made myself many times. It will obviously take more than one "throwing out" to win over trust, but it would be a start.
Appearing on al-Hurra certainly gives the air of a well-financed shop: getting paid $150 per appearance, lots of flat-screens, nice sets with city views, young semi-clueless but nice Washington interns from exotic Arab countries like Alabama, plenty of office real estate in the VOA building in addition to Virginia and elsewhere. To be fair, while I've never been paid for my appearances on Jazeera, a friend told me he was offered (had to turn down for immigration status purposes), so Hurra may not be alone on that count. But the first time I went in and saw Kanaan Makiya and Rob Sobhani in quick order before me, I figured the place was living up to its ideological reputation. Nice folks all I'm sure, but the deck was pretty stacked.
Posted by: anonymous | May 24, 2005 at 10:17 AM