New format for US-backed Arabic channel

Keach Hagey

• Last Updated: May 14. 2009 7:26PM UAE / May 14. 2009 3:26PM GMT

The budget for the whole Middle East Broadcasting Networks has grown significantly in the last two years, says Joaquin Blaya, a member of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which oversees the US government’s non-military international broadcasting services. Pawan Singh / The National

Alhurra, the Arabic-language news channel backed by the US government, is banking that the unusual format of its new daily news show can help it grab a bigger share of the increasingly crowded Arabic television news market.

The three-hour programme, called Al Youm, is broadcast live simultaneously from its hub in Dubai as well as bureaux in Cairo, Beirut, Jerusalem and the channel’s headquarters in Springfield, Virginia. Anchors and guests in each of the five studios debate issues live, giving the show a different pace and tone than traditional news programmes.

“I don’t think any country in any language has launched what we have just launched, which is a five-country play, simultaneously by satellite, hooked up live three hours a day, five days a week,” said Fran Mires, the executive producer of the show which began in March. “No one has done that. It’s technologically a lot to pull off.”

The channel has hired 150 employees from around the Arab world for the show, basing 52 of them in Dubai. The show accounts for a significant portion of the recent budget increase for the Middle East Broadcasting Networks (MBN), the organisation that oversees Alhurra and its sister radio station, Radio Sawa.

“The budget for the whole Middle East Broadcasting Networks has grown significantly in the last two years, probably 20 per cent,” said Joaquin Blaya, a member of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which oversees the US government’s non-military international broadcasting services. “Significantly, that would be due to Al Youm.”

MBN’s budget for this year is US$120 million (Dh440.7m) and Mr Blaya believes it will continue to increase because of the support of the administration of Barack Obama, the US president, for public diplomacy.

“Every indication is that they are very supportive,” he said. “We are working with them already on budgets for 2011.”

But not everyone in the media-watching world has been supportive. Alhurra has come under intense scrutiny in recent years, largely because of an investigation by Pro Publica, the non-profit news organisation, in partnership with CBS News’ 60 Minutes, which sparked congressional hearings in 2007. The investigation criticised the station’s coverage of subjects such as a call to arms by Hizbollah, as well as the lack of Arabic speakers among its senior leadership.

“That was a rehash of old news,” Mr Blaya said. “By then, everything had been changed. They were reporting on things that had transpired two years before.”

For more than two years, the channel’s vice president of news has been Danny Nassif . “He is Lebanese, and just about everybody underneath him is an Arabic speaker,” Mr Blaya said.

Today, he feels he has the support of Mr Obama and the Democratic majority congress, as well as the American taxpayer.

“American taxpayers have a history of supporting vehicles of public diplomacy,” he said. “They’ve supported the Voice of America for 65 years. They’ve supported Radio Free Europe, which is in large measure credited with helping to break the Iron Curtain. They’ve supported Radio Free Asia, and they’ve supported this project because it is important to give people of the world, particularly in areas where there are not free societies, the access to information so that they can make decisions.”

Alhurra’s most recent figures, taken before Al Youm was launched, put viewership at 27 million a week, significantly behind Arabic news titans such as Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya. But the channel does boast 55 per cent market penetration in places such as Iraq, which it targets with a local news show, and Syria, according to Nielsen figures.

Although the field has become more crowded recently with the expansion of BBC Arabic and the Arabic-language version of France 24, Mr Blaya said Alhurra still had more viewers in the region than the western stations.

Ms Mires said Alhurra could offer something that the region’s more dominant news channels could not.

“Al Jazeera does some great stuff, but it has limitations,” she said. “It is not a totally free medium. We are a totally free medium, absolutely. There isn’t anything in my three hours that we cannot do.”

As an example, the anchors in Jerusalem and Beirut appeared on the screen at the same time, despite Lebanon’s rules against communicating with Israel, she said. Although the anchors will not break any rules by communicating directly, they can participate in a larger discussion together through anchors in Dubai and Cairo.

“They don’t have a direct path, but all of them are on the screen at the same time, so in one form or another, they communicate,” she said. “That’s what our competitors don’t do.”



khagey@thenational.ae