Its takedown of feeble, US-funded news channel Al Hurra sounds like soft target city.
The promised revelation?
American taxpayers are paying for a Middle Eastern television network that broadcast an anti-Israeli diatribe as recently as last month … ProPublica monitored the broadcast last month and found a Palestinian guest named Hani El-Masri on its flagship show “Free Hour,” calling Israel a “racist” state that is conducting its own “holocaust” against Palestinians.
His exact quote, unchallenged by the host or balanced by another panel member, was “[Israel] is the occupying and racist state that imposes the stifling and deadly blockade and perpetrates a holocaust against 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza.”
It’s a point of view. Occupying? Check. Racist? Well, not exactly pro-Arab. Perpetrating a holocaust? No, but…there’s the rub.
American taxpayers are paying for a free-speech-supporting, Arab-influencing channel that is supposed to baulk at the idea of Arabs exercising their First Amendment rights, however unpalatable.
So is Al Hurra a waste of time because it’s a US-funded propaganda channel, or is it just a waste of time as a propaganda channel?
Whatever Al Hurra‘s problems, ProPublica has got to do better than this…
4 responses to “ProPublica’s flabby Al Hurra investigation”
People at Pro Publica have made it clear to me that they wanted a soft launch. They knew everyone would diss their first ‘revelation’. So the idea was to drip a few minor scoops out first. Trouble is that they appear to have taken this tactic a little bit too far. This is the kind of ‘revelation’ that you get on the average media-watch blog about ten times a day.
I expect more of 60 Minutes, let alone PP.
So ProPublica highlights the comments of a Palestinian referring to the plight of his compatriots as an Israeli “holocaust”, apparently oblivious to the widely reported comments of an Israeli minister using the Hebrew word meaning holocaust:
“… An Israeli minister today warned of increasingly bitter conflict in the Gaza Strip, saying the Palestinians could bring on themselves what he called a “holocaust”.
“The more Qassam [rocket] fire intensifies and the rockets reach a longer range, they will bring upon themselves a bigger shoah because we will use all our might to defend ourselves,” Matan Vilnai, Israel’s deputy defence minister, told army radio. …”
[The comments were widely reported, but this particular source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/feb/29/israelandthepalestinians1 ]
And why the apparent sense of outrage about the news director stacking the newsroom with friends?
“Mouafac Harb, Alhurra’s first news director. Harb helped set up Radio Sawa before coming to Alhurra. He was largely responsible for hiring the network staff and getting it on air within four months. But he has been criticized in government reports for signing lucrative deals with friends in his native Lebanon.
…In addition, a never-released report by the State Department’s Inspector General shared with ProPublica found “irregularities in contracting,” a hiring process that “may have been marred by favoritism toward Lebanese candidates or candidates of Lebanese ancestry,” …
… He then filled the newsroom largely with inexperienced Christian Lebanese reporters hired in his native Beirut and signed lucrative sole-source contracts with friends who ran advertising agencies, production companies and warehouses across the Middle East. Some low-level staff members were highly paid, including a hairdresser from Lebanon who coiffed the anchors for $100,000 a year. …
[source: http://www.propublica.org/site/author/dafna_linzer/ ]
Isn’t that the American way? Hasn’t the Bush administration been stacked with incompetent and inept friends of Bush and friends-of-friends of Bush such as Michael D. Brown who headed up FEMA to disastrous effect at the time Hurricane Katrina? And what about all Bush’s oil industry cronies and Republican party funders who get roles in the administration?
Surely someone going to the U.S. from another country would think it was their patriotic duty to stick their nose in the trough as well? Why would they see anything wrong with recruiting friends on favourable terms when that’s the way things are done over there?
Why the sense of outrage because the newsroom is stacked with inexperienced friends from Lebanon? If Al Hurra is supposed to represent an American perspective of the news, I don’t think hiring unprofessional and/or uneducated friends is the best way to promote such a perspective. Moreover, the fact that many of those people were from Lebanon (What percentage of the population of the Middle East is Lebanese? What percentage of Al Hurra, especially those is essential jobs, is Lebanese?) certainly does not promote diversity of thought, an important ideal to Americans. It seems that Al Hurra is promoting a Lebanese in America perspective.
Clearly, Bush’s example of favoritism was not an example of the “American way,” which is obvious from his current poor ratings and the country’s overall belief that american is headed in the wrong direction.