One way Alhurra is trying to "seize the moment" is by adding a one-hour morning news program and introducing town hall meetings in places like Beirut and Cairo, where reform movements seem to be picking up steam. The week of April 17-23, for example, featured a series of discussions about Syrian media and politics, broadcast live from the Damascus souq. In the first episode, a group of Syrian and Lebanese writers and journalists debated the issue of censorship in Syria, taking questions from an audience of young people. But Alhurra's team ran into difficulties and left the country in protest the next day, accusing the Syrian government of trying to censor the content of espidoes scheduled for the rest of the week, including town-hall style shows on the future of the Baath Party, political reform in Syria, and democracy in the Middle East.(3)

Alhurra's current affairs program Free Hour also broadcast a series of panel talks live from Martyr's Square during the Lebanese protests, bringing together guests like Jibran Tueni, editor of Annahar newspaper, Faysal Salman, editor of Assafir newspaper, Lebanese University professor Charles Shartouni, Hikmat Dib, member of the Free Patriotic Movement, and pro-Hariri Al-Mustaqbal parliamentary alliance MPs Ghattas Khouri and Ghinwa Jalloul. In Cairo, Alhurra produced a week of debate on women's issues as well as recent talk shows focusing on the slow pace of democratization in Egypt, giving a platform to opposition activists and other outspoken critics of President Hosni Mubarak.

Such specials are one of the strongest additions to Alhurra's programming in the past year, and represent a larger effort to strengthen the channel's locally produced original programming. The channel has increased its number of foreign bureaus and correspondents. Its overseas staff now numbers 150. Alhurra also created special programs called Iraq Decides, America Decides, and Palestine Decides to cover elections in those countries, and although some have criticized Alhurra for fielding a limited range of guests on its shows, there is no question that the channel is producing more of them live and from inside the region.

For Yara Youssef, an associate producer for Free Hour, covering recent events in Lebanon represented the high point of working at Alhurra. The 27-year-old Beirut native had endured negative comments from some of her friends in Lebanon when she went to work for the American channel, but says those criticisms have faded over time and such moments offer a kind of redemption for all the hard work and doubt.

"For us it was a sense of mission," she says. "For my team at least, the Free Hour team, it was a sense of mission to go live from the burial site and where everything was happening and to gather all these people to talk, especially students and everything. It was very poignant for us to be there and for us to do this."

Senior news producer Emile Baroody also is from Beirut. He worked for Al Jazeera for four years, Abu Dhabi TV for three years, and for a brief period in Dubai, where he worked for business channels. After working as the North American correspondent for LBC, he moved to Alhurra in January of 2004.

"What brought me to Alhurra is the same thing that got me out of the Gulf," he says. "There's a condescending way Arab media treat their viewer with. It's always that you're the best people and nothing is your fault. Arabs are never held responsible for anything. It's always the fault of someone else."

At Alhurra, Baroody says he gets to see other perspectives and cover topics that were "taboo" in the Arab media.

"The Palestinian issue is a problem, for example, but it shouldn't stop us looking at Palestinian corruption," he says. "The Arab media are often biased. Alhurra benefits by not being (based) in the Middle East. When you are there, even with the best intentions, you always get carried away by what happens around you. You work in a vacuum."

Although he never experienced anyone telling him what to report at Al Jazeera, he says the atmosphere was self-censoring.

He is happy to be working at Alhurra, but things have not always been easy. Some sources, journalists, and pundits boycotted the channel at first, and others got criticized for appearing. Hamas would not speak to Alhurra reporters, and Baroody remembers times when people interviewed by Alhurra asked that they not use a microphone with Alhurra's logo on it. But he says he is not worried. He is confident Alhurra will win people's confidence over time.

"It was the same at Al Jazeera when we started," he recalls.

Harb says he has not had trouble recruiting talent to Alhurra, despite calls for a boycott in the Arab media. He is protective of his staff, defensive of their professionalism, and angry when they are accused of betraying the Arab world by working for a US-funded channel.

"These people, they're so courageous," he says. "They're like family. They believe in democracy. The first thing they used to ask me when I was interviewing them was, 'Is this going to be propaganda?' That's the first thing they asked me. One of them asked me, 'If I'm going to another propagandist,' -- this is someone who was working for an Arab channel -- 'why should I leave unless you assure me that it's going to be different?' And I did. So there's a commitment. We made a promise to those people who left their homes. And they were attacked by some people. I call them the neo-orphans of Arab nationalism. You know, they were called traitors or whatever. It's unfair. Those people are journalists and they're good journalists."

Mission Control

Harb claims that Alhurra's dependence on government funding and commitment to mission does not conflict with the channel's journalistic integrity.

"We have a journalistic mission too and I think that journalists who don't believe in democracy are simply hack writers," he says. "They're pliable. I cannot operate, I cannot be a good journalist, unless I live in a democratic society. And that's why we are objective. We present the news, but when it comes to democracy, it's the core of what we do. I'm informing people so you can make a better choice, lighten that decision, and this is the core of democracy."

The channel does not shy from free debate, he says, and producers invite critics of US policy to participate in on-air discussions when appropriate. Alhurra also reports stories that reflect negatively on the US occupation, such as recent anti-US protests in Iraq, for example. It also covers more positive and upbeat stories than its counterparts Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya. A newscast in March, for example, ran two stories on the evening news about Palestinian and Israeli children playing soccer together and Palestinian and Israeli artists collaborating on a peace song.

Arab media serves up a "heavy dose of Palestine and Iraq, but the main focus is on the negative aspects," says senior assignment editor Vatche Sarkisian, a broadcasting veteran who has lived the past twenty years in the US and work in the Washington bureau of MBC and Al Arabiya before moving to Alhurra. "We don't discount the importance of those events," he says. "We say yes, there is violence, but there is reconstruction as well."

Harb says the goal is to provide a balanced picture of the region and separate between opinion and news, not to "brainwash" anyone.

"We want to be one of the primary sources of information for people to enrich the Arabic media scene and also given what is going on in the Middle East, we would love to make the Arab media more honest in its reporting," he says.

Harb says Alhurra is trying to raise Arab media's standards by separating news and opinion, "deemotionalizing" the news, and exercising objective news judgment. For that reason, Alhurra's policy is that reporters say people are "killed," not "martyred." They will use the term "terrorist" and not "so-called terrorism" often used by Al Jazeera and other Arab channels. Their anchors greet their viewers, with a simple "Welcome back," instead of the religious greeting "Asallamu 'Alaykum" common on Arab networks. Alhurra also will not show tapes of Bin Laden, hostages pleading for their lives, or footage that its editors consider unduly violent or bloody. Nevertheless, Alhurra has occaionally shown dead bodies and wounded victims of bombings, such as the disfigured remains of a suicide bomber in Cairo at the beginning of May, for example, and a bloodied tourist being moved into an ambulance.

Over the last year, the channel also has made a concerted effort to improve its reporting by increasing the number of correspondents in the field and trying to be more aggressive about breaking news coverage, though Harb maintains Alhurra was unfairly criticized for its coverage of Sheikh Yassin's assassination.

"We did a lot of specials that day in prime time," he points out.

But covering breaking news remains a soft spot for Alhurra, and leaves it open to accusations of downplaying negative or violent news. For example, the channel did not break into its programming for at least an hour after the rest of the Arab channels and the BBC were carrying news of the terrorist attack in Cairo's Khan El Khalili bazaar in April that killed three tourists, including an American, and wounded more than a dozen others. Harb defends Alhurra's performance, however.

"We're competing for the truth, you know, we're not competing to get the picture first," he says. "I want to make sure what I tell people is right … And we don't want to create panic, because sometimes we'll be watching a minimum explosion and if you watch those channels, you feel, wow, the world is angry, and it creates some kind of panic."

Variety Fare

After all, Alhurra is not an all-news channel. Some of its most popular programs are its lighter fare - travel and fashion shows, medical and technology series, cinema and music programs. Magazine-style shows like With the People and Very Close interview Arab personalities like Egyptian jewelry designer Azza Fahmy about her life and work or average Americans on the street about social topics like late marriage. Alhurra also broadcast the Golden Globes and Emmy Awards live.

One of Alhurra's top attractions has been its award-winning, subtitled documentary series on everything from who built the pyramids or who burned ancient Rome to FDR's presidency, World War II, the FBI, and the American Civil War. Now Alhurra is locally producing its own original Arabic documentaries that will air in the coming months.

Another relatively new addition to Alhurra's schedule is NBA and football games. Pattiz says this is a tactic designed to attract more adult males to the channel's audience, which "tends to be younger than our competitors and more female. … People who have their heels dug in most against listening to a station that is US government-funded would be older males."

Pattiz and Harb say that this "variety" programming is what gives Alhurra an identity distinct from other Arab channels, but some tension exists in determining just how much of that identity should be devoted to news and information and how much to audience-building "variety" programming. Sometimes, in fact, this outsourced entertainment programming can be so off-beat it could be considered downright offensive to conservative Arab social mores, such as the time when Alhurra broadcast a whole segment on a man who lived in a house shaped like a giant naked woman and gleefully climbed on her bare "breast" to brag about how his bedroom was located in her bosom and his hot tub in her uterus.

From within the BBG itself, Chairman Ken Tomlinson has expressed some concern that Alhurra's programming was a little heavy on the lighter fare.

"I must admit I personally raised a question with Mouafac Harb about too much fashion and Mouafac said that he thinks its healthy for people in the Middle East to see that there is a grand and beautiful world out there and that the issue of fashion as a magazine show is interested in what is happening in the world and beyond people's borders," Tomlinson says. "But the reason we created Alhurra was for news, current affairs, and to foster debates on issues that will determine the future of the region."

Not that he has anything against the NBA, but it is a question of emphasis.

"I know Norm (Pattiz) loves basketball, and by no means am I going to deprive people of the Middle East of the opportunity to see basketball, but we're in the news and information business," he says.

Figures Lie and Liars Figure

At the heart of the debate about Alhurra is a dispute over numbers. According to research carried out for the BBG by marketing firms ACNeilsen and Ipsos-Stat, Alhurra has been a rousing success. A February 2005 telephone poll conducted by Ipsos-Stat in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and Kuwait found that over 34 percent of Arabic speakers over the age of fifteen reported watching Alhurra in the past week, compared to 23 percent in a similar poll conducted last year in the same cities. The same Ipsos-Stat research also showed Alhurra reaching 40 percent of Al Jazeera's audience in a given week and reported that 61 percent of Alhurra's viewers consider its news reliable, an increase from 50 percent in spring 2004.

But the BBG's numbers raise some suspicions among Alhurra's detractors. By asking respondents simply if they have watched Alhurra in the past week, the research avoids the question of how Alhurra is doing in comparison to the competition, while raising the possibility that some respondents only watched for a few minutes and are not in fact regular Alhurra viewers.

Rugh says a more useful question would have been, "What do you watch on a crisis day and how long did you watch it?"

Other research has drawn a very different picture of Alhurra's reception and credibility. A June 2004 Zogby survey conducted by Brookings scholar Shibley Telhami found that Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya left Alhurra in the dust as far as Arabs' preferred news sources were concerned. Telhami's study polled 3,300 people in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Jordan, Lebanon, and the United Arab Emirates. Al Jazeera came in number one with Al Arabiya a distant second. No one identified Alhurra as the first choice for news and only 3.8 percent picked it as a second choice.(3)

Another June 2004 survey by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research reported that only 1.1 percent of Palestinians mostly watched Alhurra, compared to 58.1 percent who for Al Jazeera, 12 percent Al-Manar and 10.2 percent Al Arabiya. In April 2004, a Gallop poll reported that only 6 percent of Iraqis watched Alhurra in the past week. More recently, in a survey conducted between November 2004 and January 2005, Arab Advisors Group reported that only 3 percent of Egyptians watched Alhurra, less than BBC World (5 percent) and Nile News (9 percent). Al Jazeera registered 88 percent with Al Arabiya second at 35 percent. Only 8 percent of viewers with an opinion found Alhurra "very trustworthy" while 29.2 percent considered it "not trustworthy."

The BBG's Tomlinson says he is not overly concerned about the differences in viewership numbers. Perhaps people do not like to admit they watch it, he suggests.

"I gotta tell you, as an old journalist, my attitude towards a lot of this stuff is Mark Twain's assertion that 'figures lie and liars figure,'" Tomlinson says. "But I think when you launch something like this, in the early months, just an indication, for example the figures that we just released were significantly higher than the viewership figures that we measured last August. It seems to me that that indicates that the viewership is increasing. We have people in the field in the next couple of months doing another Neilsen survey. I do think people are watching it. Do we have Al Jazeera type figures? No. But if someone told me three years ago when I came into this job that we can do something that can give you 20 million regular viewers in the Arab world. I would say my God, that would be fantastic." (See Alhurra on the Cairo Street in this issue for a sample of Egyptian views of the US-funded channel.)

Of Buggy Whips and Broadcasting

The success or failure of Alhurra is entangled in a larger debate to determine the best strategy in the US battle for Arab and Muslim hearts and minds.

According to BBG chairman Tomlinson, the twenty-first century war on terror must utilize twenty-first century technology. Old public diplomacy tactics like exchange programs, cultural centers, and VOA radio alone just do not have the mass reach or appeal necessary to make a real difference, he believes.

"I guess I view some of the public diplomacy traditionalists the way I view buggy whip manufacturers in 1930s," he says. "I love buggies and I love buggy whips, but if you want to engage in modern day communication with people you first need to do it through broadcasting. Twenty-five years ago, the story was radio and today it is satellite television. By the way, I applaud exchange programs, I applaud the other programs of public diplomacy. I want to fund those also. But if you want to reach large numbers of people, you have to do it through broadcasting and television. It is the modern reality."

Tomlinson says he is more concerned with communication than with diplomacy, which he prefers to leave to the diplomats.

"Give me a great debate any time and I will view this as something better than diplomacy," he says. "It is all about ideas."

But Ambassador Rugh says one of the primary problems with US public diplomacy strategy, typified by Alhurra and Radio Sawa, has been that America's conversation with the Arab and Muslim world has taken on the form of a one-way monologue, rather than a two-way dialogue.

"The best public diplomacy is face-to-face and interactive," he says.

Vilifying and stereotyping the Arab media as rabidly anti-American does not help the situation, Rugh says, and it discourages cross-cultural discussion.

Harb and other Alhurra staff argue that the channel is willing to broach taboo subjects that get ignored or marginalized in the mainstream Arab press, but while Alhurra has produced recent shows on topics such as Islamist movements, torture in Arab prisons, child exploitation, censorship, corruption, and women's rights, these are all issues that have been covered on Al Jazeera and other Arab satellites before.

Marc Lynch, a political science professor at Williams College, has written a content analysis of Al Jazeera showing that the channel often dismissed by Harb, Tomlinson, Pattiz, and Bush administration officials as an irresponsible pariah actually broadcasts a wide variety of debates on everything from government repression of protests in Arab states to AIDS, unemployment, failure of democracies in the region, and a wide range of women's issues. He says he disagrees with the fundamental premise behind Alhurra, and critiques it for relying on a narrow variety of guests. "They're misdiagnosing the problem," he argues.

"That said, the point about which I've changed my mind is that there doesn't seem to be any opportunity cost to having it out there," he concedes. "We might as well use it and try to make the best of it and try to make it a better product. My request is don't consider it public diplomacy, don't take away critical public diplomacy funds from exchange programs and on-the-ground cultural centers. If you have limited resources, put them where they can make a difference. To the extent resources are being spent on Alhurra they're not going elsewhere."

A white paper published in October 2003 by the Advisory Group on Public Diplomacy for the Arab and Muslim World called for dramatic increases in funding and increased leadership and coordination for US public diplomacy efforts, which it said were woefully insufficient to affect "the national security threat emanating from political instability, economic deprivation, and extremism, especially in the Arab and Muslim world."

The report asked the question "How valuable is government-sponsored international broadcasting in the Arab and Muslim World? With much of the potential broadcast audience hostile to the United States and receiving, unlike citizens of Iron Curtain countries, abundant information from other electronic sources, the answer is that we do not know."

The report, by former US ambassador to Syria and Israel Edward P. Djerejian, cited a GAO survey that asked State Department public affairs officers how effective they thought government-sponsored broadcasting was. Only 5 percent answered very effective while 23 percent judged it "generally ineffective" and 9 percent "very ineffective," with another 27 percent answering "neither effective nor ineffective."

The report questioned Radio Sawa's emphasis on audience-building entertainment over hard news and asked policymakers to consider whether funds for a TV station "can be better spent on other public diplomacy instruments, including others involving electronic media."

Within the BBG itself, the debate has been touchy. In July, over 400 Voice of America staff members petitioned Congress, complaining that Alhurra and Radio Sawa were siphoning away funds from VOA without being held to the same standards.

Rugh suggests that in addition to reviving VOA Arabic, more American officials, Arab Americans, and private citizens should appear regularly on the existing Arab satellite channels, which have the large audiences and home-grown credibility Alhurra lacks. It is not even necessary for American guests to speak Arabic on these programs, he says, because the channels can provide voiceovers. The challenge is convincing senior state department and administration officials, who "tend not to be anxious to appear on Arab TV because they see more negatives than positives" when they do not have editorial control over how their remarks are played.

"My assumption is there is a place for US-sponsored broadcasting. I don't dismiss it as some people do on the grounds that an Arab listener won't want to hear what the US government is saying," Rugh says. "The question is what should we be doing in public diplomacy? In principle, we should be doing TV, but we should be doing it right."

Harb argues that Alhurra's mission to promote democracy is a long-term project, and should be given a chance to mature. Improving America's image among Arabs will be an eventual byproduct of telling the truth, he says.

"My main thing is that Alhurra is not there to replace the Arab media," he adds. "Alhurra is not there to brainwash anyone. Alhurra is there to be part of the Arab local media scene, and this is not the first time the US government has broadcast news and information in different languages across the world and if Hizbullah could have a satellite television channel, is it too much for the greatest power on earth to have a satellite channel? Why so threatened?"

Lindsay Wise is managing editor of Transnational Broadcasting Studies' new print edition, and deputy managing editor of TBS Electronic. She has an M.Phil. in Modern Middle Eastern Studies from St. Antony's College, University of Oxford. In addition to her work with TBS journal, she also is a freelance journalist in Cairo. She can be reached at linds@aucegypt.edu.

NOTES

1. Here Abu Salih is alluding to the title of a controversial television serial that aired during Ramadan 2002. Titled, A Horse without a Rider, the serial was based on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a text that has gained widespread distribution in the Arab world today, but that is in fact judged by historians to be an anti-Semetic, nineteenth century forgery written in the 19th century by a Russian agent to help justify the pogroms and persecution of Jews in Russia. Israel, the Anti-Defamation League, and US diplomats unsuccessfully tried to keep the serial from airing, but Egypt and other Arab satellites broadcast it anyway.

2. This is especially interesting when compared to an Al Jazeera promotional ad that appeared the same night in which scenes of Saddam Hussein's Information Minister Mohammed Sa'id Al-Sahaf blasting Al Jazeera and banning it from Iraq were alternated with scenes of the current Iraqi government complaining bitterly about the channel and eventually throwing it out of the country. The ad ended with the station's logo, "The opinion and the other opinion," taking on a new twist.

3. According to an Alhurra press release dated April 20, 2005, "Before sending the team to Damascus, Alhurra management was assured by the relevant Syrian authorities that nothing would interfere with free discussion." The press release went on to point out that "Alhurra has become an important source of news and information in Syria. In December of 2004, just ten months after the satellite television network was launched, ACNielsen surveys showed that Alhurra's weekly viewership in Syria was 39 percent of all adults (15 and over) residing in satellite television households. The survey also indicated that Alhurra was a source of credible news for Syrians; 60 percent of Alhurra viewers stated that the news on Alhurra is reliable." According to the Syrian Arab News Agency, SANA, however, the Syrian director of foreign information Dr. Nizar Mayhub claimed that "the [information] ministry had offered all possible facilities to Alhurra. The evidence is that the first episode of the programme was a success, as the channel itself admitted .... [A] number of people who were supposed to appear on the remaining three episodes of the programme are temporarily away from Syria. This indicates that the Alhurra team did not coordinate with the participants in advance. This forced the channel to cancel its programme without any interference from the Foreign Information Department or any other Syrian quarter."

4. Barbara Slavin, "VOA Changes Prompt Staffer Protests," USA Today, July 12, 2004.

[printer friendly version]