From the ever readable
Riverbend:
I get really tired of the emails deriding Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya for their news coverage, telling me they're too biased towards Arabs, etc. Why is it ok for CNN to be completely biased towards Americans and BBC to be biased towards the British but Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya have to objective and unprejudiced and, preferably, pander to American public opinion? They are Arab news networks- they SHOULD be biased towards Arabs. I agree that there is quite a bit of anti-America propaganda in some Arabic media, but there is an equal, if not more potent, amount of anti-Arab, anti-Muslim propaganda in American media. The annoying thing is that your average Arab knows much more about American culture and history than the average American knows about Arabs and Islam.
I wish everyone could see Al-Hurra- the new 'unbiased' news network started by the Pentagon and currently being broadcast all over the Arab world...The news and reports are so completely biased, they only lack George Bush and Condi Rice as anchors...Interestingly enough, Asa'ad Abu Khalil said that Sawa and Al-Hurra are banned inside of America due to some sort of law that doesn't allow the broadcast of blatant political propaganda or something to that effect. I'd love to know more about that.
MSNBC has a nice article about al-Hurra which quotes some opinions on the network, many of them mistrustful of the motives of the broadcast. Some are happy to have a new network and finding it watchable, though they seem generally unimpressed by the lack of content that would differentiate them from al-Jazeera. An editorial in an Arab paper lambasted the network for being state propaganda under a different guise:
Al Quds Al Arabi, a newspaper that is often critical of the United States, described the broadcast's beginnings as "disappointing, characterized ... by monotony and an almost total lack of professionalism."
The unsigned editorial accused the network of pandering to the United States by having President Bush as its first guest and posing only polite questions, "so as not to anger the boss."
Critics contend that another state-owned station is the last thing the region needs at a time when new Arab networks are trying to break Arab governments' monopoly on information.
Far from ushering in a new era of press freedom, "it is like going backward because America has introduced another government-controlled media. They opened up with Bush's face, typical of government-controlled media," Al Kazziha, the political science professor, said.
Is it really worth spending $62m a year on something that a lot of Iraqis cannot view and that a lot of Iraqis get from al-Jazeera already? How long is the network going to be up and running? Whose budget does this come out of? When we transfer power to Iraq will we transfer control of al-Hurra as well? Is anyone actually watching this network?
Also, I couldn't seem to find who has overall control of the network - I know that Mouafac Harb from Sawa is the news director, but since the goverment is providing the funding surely if the content goes against what the government wants the Middle East to hear there exists the threat of the plug being pulled?
If this is promoting a free media in Iraq, it's not the right way to go about it.