I've got a longer and slightly differently focused essay about the al-Hurra controversies now up in the opinion section of the online journal Arab Media and Society (formerly Transnational Broadcasting Studies). I actually wrote this one before the Guardian piece - some of the arguments are the same, but in this one I take a longer view and focus on some of my longer-standing points about the station. Here are some excerpts of this one:
Some of the problems with Alhurra had to do with its management, others with more structural problems. Alhurra's founders seemed to think that the Arab world was like the former Soviet space, deprived of information and desperate for an objective, credible source of news and free public debate. That would have been true in the 1980s. But at the time of its launch (2004) the Arab world was actually drowning in satellite television, with multiple sources of information and talk shows which already discussed all the issues which Alhurra claimed to be introducing. Alhurra, with its stigma of American funding, never had a chance to be more than a drop in the ocean. Other than a few times when it irritated Syria, Alhurra simply failed to generate any political debate or controversy.
...The other major issue raised by these events has to do with Alhurra’s lack of transparency and accountability. Information about Alhurra’s content has always been hard to come by. Alhurra has no live feed available in the United States (unlike Radio Sawa, to which you can listen on-line), features only a rudimentary website, offers no transcripts of its programs in Arabic or English (unlike Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya, both of which offer full transcripts of all their programs online), and does not even publish basic information about the topics of programs or their guests. There has simply been no way for anyone—whether Congress or external analysts within the United States—to monitor Alhurra’s content. Supposedly, Alhurra cannot provide such information because it would violate the Smith-Mundt Act against the domestic dissemination of foreign propaganda. But it’s telling that Radio Sawa—which falls under the same BBG mandate—offers a live streaming feed over the internet with no evident problems. This lack of transparency might better be seen as a method for avoiding accountability and for protecting the station’s reputation in Washington (and budgets). Perhaps now there will be more support for congressionally mandating transparency about the station’s programming.
Alhurra's new management might even welcome such transparency as its best protection against cherry-picking attacks such as Mowbray’s, in which unnamed insiders fed a steady stream of seemingly damning anecdotes which nobody else could either contextualize or critique. Such increased access to content might also increase its impact with the millions of Arabs who routinely read Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya’s websites—if, that is, anyone involved in the Alhurra debates actually cares about such things.
Read the whole thing at Arab Media and Society. While you're there, you can also read Ken Tomlinson's defense of al-Hurra, and (if you're getting bored of al-Hurra) Paul Cochrane's fascinating piece on the Lebanese media's role in fanning sectarianism.
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