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.