Did anyone else see this piece on Al Hurra?

[birdgirl73]

U.S.-Funded Arab TV's Credibility Crisis, 60 Minutes/ProPublica Joint Investigation Finds Anti-Israel Rhetoric On U.S.-Funded Al Hurra TV - CBS News

U.S. Funds News In The Mideast
60 Minutes and ProPublica investigate Al Hurra, a television channel in the Middle East that is funded by U.S. taxpayers, which has come under scrutiny for a raft of problems. Scott Pelley reports.

U.S.-Funded Arab TV's Credibility Crisis
Al Hurra, headquartered in Springfield, Va., is funded by U.S. taxpayers. (CBS)

America has been struggling with its image in the Middle East for decades but, after Iraq, Arab opinion plummeted. The Bush administration felt it had to act fast to explain America to the Arab world. So it began spending about $100 million a year on a U.S. government news channel in Arabic. It's called "Al Hurra," meaning "The Free One."

As correspondent Scott Pelley reports, Al Hurra's symbol is a herd of unbridled horses, and for American taxpayers it's been a wild ride.

60 Minutes has been looking into Al Hurra in a project with ProPublica, a new, non-profit news organization dedicated to investigative journalism. With so much at stake at Al Hurra, we were surprised to find what it's putting on the air. Some of it has supported terrorism and denied the Holocaust; insiders say Al Hurra has been undermined by loose financial and editorial controls, while its executives try to manage 24-hour news in a language most of them don't understand. --Continued on link--

Click on link above for the full video segment and text, which goes on too long to post here.
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I thought this was a piece worth watching and talking about. I'd really only heard the name "Al Hurra" a few times and didn't know any details about its history or background. Takes a few to watch it or read the story, but it's quite thorough, and it'll be interesting to see what the rest of you all think.

birdgirl73 Reviewed by birdgirl73 on 06-23-2008. Did anyone else see this piece on Al Hurra? U.S.-Funded Arab TV's Credibility Crisis, 60 Minutes/ProPublica Joint Investigation Finds Anti-Israel Rhetoric On U.S.-Funded Al Hurra TV - CBS News U.S. Funds News In The Mideast 60 Minutes and ProPublica investigate Al Hurra, a television channel in the Middle East that is funded by U.S. taxpayers, which has come under scrutiny for a raft of problems. Scott Pelley reports. U.S.-Funded Arab TV's Credibility Crisis Al Hurra, headquartered in Springfield, Va., is funded by U.S. Rating: 5

[killerweed420]

Yeah I've seen this before. Tax payers money at work.lol They are ingenious at finding ways to piss it away.

[dragonrider]

I saw this and it was really astonishing and infuriating. So far, they have spent $500 million of our money on it, and it is a complete and total failure.

It sounded like at first it had no credibility, because it wasn't even covering the major news stories of the Middle East. One example was a major speech being delivered by a major Arab leader --- it was covered by every single other Middle Eastern news outlet, but Al Hura was running a cooking show.

Then they decided to cover the stories, but with no editorial oversight whatsoever. So they covered things like the "holocaust deniers conference" (whatever it was called), but with no balancing points of view. In fact the reporter for that conference made his own on-air anti-semitic remarks. There were several examples of the station running speeches by terrorists or anti-American, anti-Isreali speakers with either no commentary at all, or with additional anti-American, anti-Isreali commentary.

Apparently no one who is in charge of this thing even speaks Arabic and mostly they don't even know what they are putting on the air. How can a publisher in any medium not know what the hell they are publishing? I was actually glad to hear that they only have about 2% of the audience in the Middle East, because at least no one is watching this stupid fiasco.

Really, what are they trying to accomplish with this? If it is propaganda, then it has completely backfired and we are actually spreading our enemies' propaganda. If it is actual balanced news reporting that reports on the news stories of interest to Middle Easterners, but also also reports the western point of view on those stories, well that's not happening either.

They need to pull the plug on this thing.

[killerweed420]

Term limits would help a little to stop this kind of nonsense. I would rather thet we become a true democracy and the tax payers get to vote on all legislation.

[DrSpoof]

Yeah I saw this on HuffPo this morning.

As dragonrider said, the HEAD OF THE TV STATION DOESNT EVEN SPEAK ARABIC!!!

What a ridiculous country we live in. Spend millions of dollars on something and then get common-sense decisions wrong.

If you asked a 5th grader if it was a good idea to put a non-arabic speaking american in charge of a foreign tv station, theyd say no. So why cant the people who get paid not to fuck these decisions up get em right?

DrSpiggs