June 22, 2008
U.S.-Funded Arab TV's Credibility Crisis
60 Minutes/ProPublica Joint Investigation Finds Anti-Israel Rhetoric On U.S.-Funded Al Hurra TV
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Play CBS Video Video 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.
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Video Radio Sawa Report Hamid Alkifaey was a managing director for Al Hurra. He says that after he left, Radio Sawa broadcast a story in which an unidentified speaker called for the deaths of more U.S. soldiers in Iraq.
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Video Al Hurra's Baghdad Bureau Danny Nassif is Al Hurra's current news director, his first job in television news. We interviewed him shortly after Al Hurra's Baghdad bureau chief resigned.
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Al Hurra, headquartered in Springfield, Va., is funded by U.S. taxpayers. (CBS)
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"We were watching, a couple of weeks ago, the broadcast Free Hour. And one of the guests said that Israel's policies toward the Palestinians amounts to, in his words, a Holocaust conducted by a racist state. Were you aware of that?" Pelley asks.
"No. But, you know, I think it's a little unfair to pick a sentence out of an hour program - if the full context - balanced that, it's a different situation," Conniff says.
We checked and the speaker was neither challenged by the host, nor balanced by another guest.
"It's not necessarily just pulling a sentence out of a program. There's a pattern here, critics of this channel say. You have Nasrallah given an hour of air time. You have the Holocaust deniers conference covered. Now, you have this person saying that Israel is a
racist state. Is this the kind of thing the American taxpayer should be paying for?" Pelley asks.
"No. There's absolutely not a pattern," Conniff argues. "Now you're picking something that occurred, I don't know, two years ago, and…."
"Two weeks ago," Pelley points out.
"Two weeks ago. But that was, you know, a year and a half later. And you know, I not even gonna comment on that. I'll be happy to look into it, and see what the full context is," Conniff replies.
This week, Conniff told 60 Minutes that "any implication that Al Hurra is anti-Israeli is absolutely wrong."
So far U.S. taxpayers have spent nearly half a billion dollars on Al Hurra. After four years, we wanted to know if anyone is watching.
"I think by and large it's irrelevant," says Dr. Shibley Telhami, a top researcher of Arab public opinion.
He's a professor at the University of Maryland, and over the last six years he has conducted polls across the Middle East asking Arabs what they watch. He told Pelley that the channel the Bush administration loves to hate, Qatar-based Al Jazeera, is the runaway number one, with 53 percent of the audience.
Dr. Telhami says Al Hurra ranks toward the very bottom of that list. "I think in there, it takes about two percent," he explains.
"So, after half a billion dollars spent on Al Hurra, the effect in the region has been what?" Pelley asks.
"In terms of public opinion, less than zero," Telhami says.
Telhami says many in the Arab world say they dislike the United States because of its policies. It is not, he says, a misunderstanding or a distorted image portrayed by other channels. "It's what we do in Iraq. It's what we do on the Arab-Israeli issue. It's how we define our war on terrorism. Most people interpret it as a war on Islam," he says. "Every single year, anger with America has increased. Think about how could you get to that point if you're succeeding?"
It's important to note Telhami's polling does not include Iraq, which Al Hurra considers its biggest audience.
Produced by Graham Messick, Michael Karzis, Dafna Linzer and Michael Radutzky
© MMVIII, CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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See all 311 Commentsre: holocaust "denier" conference, the position taken is that the deaths are woefully over advertised in comparison to 20M native americans killed, 10-20 chinese killed by japan, etc. Bush''s dig against ahmadenijad is pure hypocrisy. it was the respected john hopkins/lancet journal using the best scientific methods estimated 665k iraqi deaths (later report 1M). bush was asked about their report to which he replied "I think..30k give or take". This is like ahmadinijad taking the same liberties of downward revision of 6M jews to 270k deaths.
Please correct this omission before scheduling this segment for reruns, and next time try your best to return to the reporting standards of Al Jazeera and the BBC that you attained in the past (pre-Laura Logan and Blackwater).
A. Tworkowski
Glendale, CA 91204
It''s called a propaganda machine, and is quite evidently the same here in the U.S.
The $500 million should have been used for people in this country, ie social security, and the homeless, etc,etc, too many to list here!
What an embarrassing shame this is and i understand why USA citizens are ashamed of our government.
Religion = cult behavior
If you do not question, you are brainwashed.
Posted by JoeCoolSwat at 10:12 AM : Jun 23, 2008
NO LAWS AGAINST THE FREE EXCERSIZE THEREOF.....you know what that means? It means you don''t have a right to be free from religion
Let get together and estimate how fast I wipe the floor with your Emo hair
My Estimate: Zero
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See all 311 Comments