US-backed Arabic TV news show mooted

Alhurra, the US government-funded Arabic television channel, plans to launch a new news programme focusing on local stories from the Middle East.

Alhurra, the US government-funded Arabic television channel, is planning to launch a news programme focused on events in the Middle East. The programme, which will be launched simultaneously from the channel's bureaus in Dubai, Beirut, Morocco, Jerusalem and its US headquarters in Virginia, is expected to begin in the next two months, according to industry sources. It signals an expansion of programming at a time when the 24-hour news channel is facing questions about its fate under the new administration of the US President, Barack Obama. Democrats have long been critical of the channel, which was launched by the administration of the former US president, George W Bush, in 2004 in a move to counter the influence of Al Jazeera in the Middle East. It has cost more than US$500 million (Dh1.83bn), according to a report by ProPublica and CBS's 60 Minutes that claimed the Arabic channel had failed to live up to its journalistic mandate, or attract an audience. Deirdre Kline, the director of communications at the Middle East Broadcasting Networks, the Virginia-based non-profit organisation that runs both Alhurra and its sister station, Radio Sawa, with a grant from the US government-backed Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), declined to comment on either the new programmes or the prospects of the channel under the new administration. "Alhurra is always looking for new and exciting programmes," she said. "However, we are not doing any interviews right now." Several media watchers have interpreted Mr Obama's decision to give his first interview as president to Al Arabiya, the Dubai-based news channel of the Saudi-backed satellite broadcaster, MBC, as a blow for the US government's own Arabic-language channel. One of those was Michael Rubin, the editor of Middle East Quarterly, who wrote on the National Review Online that he was "curious whether the choice of Al Arabiya signals the administration's abandonment of the US-funded Alhurra satellite channel". Marc Lynch, an associate professor of political science at George Washington University, wrote on his Abu Aardvark weblog that "Obama's choice to give his ground-breaking interview to the Saudi Al Arabiya and not to the American Alhurra is as clear a statement as it is possible to make of Alhurra's failure". Others have seen indications about the future of Alhurra in Mr Obama's choice of Ernest Wilson, the dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California, to lead the transition team for the BBG and other public diplomacy initiatives in the state department. Last year, the Annenberg School for Communication conducted a study of Alhurra, commissioned by the US government, that concluded the channel's journalism was "sub-standard" and it had "failed to become competitive". In her report in December on the matter, ProPublica's Dafna Linzer wrote that Mr Obama was "contemplating major changes". [e-mail]